


Time Heals All Wounds

by telperion_15



Category: Primeval
Genre: Action/Adventure, Alternate Canon, Angst, Creature Attack, Developing Relationship, First Time, Fix-It, M/M, Prehistoric, Timey-Wimey
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-25
Updated: 2012-03-25
Packaged: 2017-11-02 12:21:34
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 45,929
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/368930
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/telperion_15/pseuds/telperion_15
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's the 'what happened next' scenario, as following on from the end of episode 1.06.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers for episodes 1.01, 1.02 and 1.06.
> 
> A note about OCs:  
> Primeval fandom on LiveJournal has generated a number of fanon OCs, created by different authors and freely used by others, to the extent that some of them have now taken on lives of their own. The ones that appear in this fic, Jacobs, Anders, Rees, Carter and Maguire, belong to me.

“Oh my god.  Oh my god.”

It was almost too much for Nick to take in.  First the revelation of Stephen and Helen’s relationship, then Claudia’s disappearance, and now the anomaly was behaving strangely.  _Very_ strangely, in fact.  What the bloody hell was going on?  He couldn’t quite decide if the anomaly was expanding towards him, or if he was being drawn towards _it_.  All he knew was that the shards of pointed light were starting to surround him, and they were pulsating and dancing more vigorously than ever.

“Nick!”

Next thing he knew, Nick was on his knees on the forest floor, several feet away from the anomaly.  Stephen was standing over him, looking worried, and Nick felt a sudden surge of anger.  What right had Stephen to be worried about him now?

“What?” he snapped peevishly, glaring at the people standing around him, all of whom had expressions matching Stephen’s.  “What _is_ the matter with you all?”

“You were going to step through,” said Stephen quietly.

“No I wasn’t!”

“It looked like you were, Professor.”  Unexpectedly, the voice was Connor’s – not someone that Nick would normally have expected to contradict him.

“It was going to engulf you,” Abby added.  “If Stephen hadn’t pulled you out of the way, you’d be back in the Permian right about now.”

Nick risked a glance at the anomaly, which now appeared to have settled down somewhat, although it was still twice the size of what normally occurred, and was flickering strangely.  What had happened to it?  Why had it expanded?  And would it have swallowed him up, like unresisting prey?  He didn’t know the answers to these questions.  There were too many strange things going on at the moment for him to even begin trying to answer them.

“If we’ve _quite_ finished debating whether Professor Cutter needs a strait-jacket, do we think we could get back to the matter at hand?” 

Lester’s voice carried its usual hint of a sneer, and it took all of Nick’s available willpower to resist punching his lights out.  So instead he pushed himself to his feet and fixed the civil servant with a glare that could have frozen molten rock.

“And what exactly do you consider the matter at hand to be?” he asked coldly.

“Well, I’m no expert, but it would appear that the anomalies are behaving in an abnormal manner.  Or at least, abnormal compared to what we’ve seen so far.  If it’s not too much trouble, do you think you and your team could work out what on earth’s going on?”  There was no mistaking the sarcasm now, and Nick was sorely tempted to tell Lester just where he could stick his ‘abnormal anomalies’, and walk away.

Except…

“And what about Claudia Brown?”

“Ah, yes.  Claudia Brown.  The mysterious disappearing woman.  Who, as far as we’re all concerned, never existed in the first place.  Tell me, Professor, how do you propose to go about finding a woman whom none of your colleagues can even remember?”

Nick walked towards Lester until they were almost nose-to-nose.  “Well, first,” he began, in a dangerously soft voice, “I’d like a team of men to help me search the woods in case she’s just got lost.  But since I suspect that’s not the case, I’d then like you to give me access to the civil service personnel files, to see if you’re hiding something from me.  And finally, I really like you to tell me _what the fuck is going on!_ ”  Nick was yelling now, and he was gratified to see Lester flinch away slightly from his vehemence.  Happy just to have scored a point, he reigned himself in again.  “But since I’m clearly not going to get any of those things, I’ll have to go about finding Claudia in my own way, won’t I?”

Turning on his heel, he strode away from all of them, ignoring Lester’s grimace of disdain, ignoring Connor and Abby’s apprehensive yet sympathetic looks, ignoring the ‘wish we were anywhere but here’ expressions on the faces of the remainder of Ryan’s team, and most of all ignoring Stephen’s movement towards him as he passed.

He could feel Stephen following him, but it was easier to pretend that he didn’t know.  Stephen was the last person he wanted to acknowledge right now, and secretly he was hoping that the other man would lose his nerve and not break the silence.

“Nick.”

He carried on walking.

“Nick, please.”

“Leave me alone, Stephen.  I’ve got nothing to say to you.  And, as far as I’m concerned, you’ve got nothing to say to me.”

“But…”

“ _Just leave me alone_.”

They had reached Nick’s truck.  Before Stephen could start talking again, Nick climbed in and sped off, leaving Stephen as a receding figure in the rear-view mirror.

*   *   *   *   * 

“Need a lift?”

Stephen turned away from watching Nick’s truck vanish into the distance to find Abby contemplating him with an air of scorn, which was accompanied by a slight air of pity.  It was not a combination designed to make Stephen feel good about himself.

“Yes, thanks,” he said quietly.

“You should know that this does not mean I in any way condone what you did to Cutter,” said Abby fiercely.  “But I wouldn’t leave my worst enemy out here tonight – not after seeing what those predators can do.”

Two-and-a-half hours later Stephen let himself into his flat, having spent what had felt like a very long car journey crushed in the back of Abby’s Mini (she had made him sit in the back as some kind of punishment, presumably).  Now, he wanted nothing more than to grab a quick shower and slide into bed.

But something was nagging at him, preventing him from settling.  And that something was Nick.

He knew that he was completely, utterly, and horrifically in the wrong over Helen.  Even if had happened over eight years ago, the fact that he had kept it from Nick all this time only compounded his guilt.  He needed to apologise – again – and try to make amends.

Stephen considered.  Nick didn’t live too far from him – Stephen could drive there in only a couple of minutes.  But he felt like he needed to clear his head a little before facing the music.  Walking seemed like a good idea.

The evening was cool and clear, and there were several other people walking the streets of his neighbourhood.  One or two of them even smiled at him in recognition, although the smiles changed to frowns when Stephen failed to acknowledge them, lost as he was in his thoughts.  He had no idea what he was going to say to Nick – he only knew that somehow he had to make things right.

But as he stood outside Nick’s front door, he hesitated.  Was he really doing the right thing?  Was Nick ready to listen to him yet?  Would Nick _ever_ be ready to listen to him?

Ultimately, Stephen decided it didn’t matter.  He had to do something to mend his and Nick’s friendship, and if he didn’t do it now it would only become harder.

But now there was another decision to make.  Should he knock, or should he let himself in with the key Nick had given him so many years ago?  Given the welcome he was likely to receive, knocking seemed more polite.  But then again, that would also give Nick ample opportunity to shut the door in his face.  It would have to be the key.

Quietly, Stephen slid the key into the lock and let himself into the house.  There had been no lights showing in any of the front windows, and he had therefore deduced that Nick must be in his study, or more accurately ‘the room he used to get away from Helen, and now used to get away from her memory’, on the first floor at the back.  In fact, the study was more used now than the main living room on the ground floor.  Stephen had lost count of the number of times he had crashed on Nick’s sofabed, being too drunk or too tired to drive home.  He smiled wryly to himself.  He suspected that wouldn’t be happening again at any time in the near future.

As he reached the top of the stairs, Stephen could see the light filtering around the edges of the study door that told him that Nick was indeed in there.  Gingerly, he pushed the door open, expecting at any second to have something hurled at his head.  Indeed, it wasn’t beyond the realms of possibility that Nick would simply punch his lights out the second he saw him.

But neither of these things happened.  Nick was standing on the other side of the room, his back to Stephen, gazing out of the window.  There was a glass of Scotch dangling from his right hand, and glancing around, Stephen could see the half-empty bottle standing on the desk.  That worried him slightly.  He knew that the bottle had been practically full before this evening – he had been the one to open it on the occasion of his last visit to Nick’s place, three days ago.

Nick was giving no signs that he had heard Stephen approach, and Stephen was just about to clear his throat to make his presence known when Nick spoke.

“Hello, Stephen.”

Stephen swallowed.  “Hello, Nick.”

Without turning, Nick waved his empty hand towards the bottle on the desk.  “Help yourself to a drink, why don’t you?”

Nonplussed, Stephen did as he was instructed.  This was entirely too weird.  He had expected yelling and recriminations, but instead it looked like they were going to have a civilised conversation over a drink.

“Sit.”

Nick still hadn’t turned away from the window, and as he sank on to the sofa Stephen started to wonder if he was going to have this ‘civilised conversation’ with Nick’s back.

But then Nick sighed, rolled his shoulders slightly, and moved towards the desk.  Topping up his own drink, he finally looked at Stephen, propping himself against the desk as he did so.  Stephen was faintly impressed by Nick’s ability to walk in a straight line, given the amount of alcohol he must have consumed.

“I have just one question for you,” said Nick quietly.  “And I think you can probably guess what it is.”

“Why?” replied Stephen.

“Yes,” Nick agreed.  “Why?”

Stephen had being trying to work out an answer to this expected question for the last three hours, and he gave Nick the best he had been able to come up with.  “I was young.  I was stupid.  And I guess I was a little flattered.  Helen was like a mentor to me.  An idol, almost.  I was flattered that she would pick me.”

Nick chuckled, but the sound was dry and bitter.  “Pick you?  She didn’t pick you, Stephen.  You just happened to be the most convenient person.  You were around most often, and were therefore the easiest to get at.  If there’s one thing I’ve learned about Helen, it’s that she didn’t work at something if she didn’t have to.  Why go to the effort of attracting a man when she had you yapping at her heels like a puppy?  All she had to do was snap her fingers and you were there like a shot.”

Nick snapped his own fingers to demonstrate his point.  The sound provoked an emotion that Stephen hadn’t expected to feel – anger.

“Why would you assume that she was just using me?” he asked coldly.  “As far as I was concerned, we had something special.”  He knew that this was not the way to go about repairing his and Nick’s friendship, but he didn’t like being made to feel small and insignificant.

Nick’s laugh was louder this time.  “Helen has never had anything special with anyone in her entire life,” he said.  “Not even with me.  I thought the same as you, once.  That we meant something to each other.  But all I’ve ever meant to Helen was status and a way to get ahead in her field.”

Stephen was shocked.  “But you’ve been grieving for her for eight years.  Why bother, if you knew your marriage was a sham?”

“Oh, it’s taken me a long time to realise just how much of a sham my marriage was,” Nick replied.  “In fact, you might almost say that it was a very recent epiphany.”

Stephen felt his guilt rising again.  “Nick, I’m sorry,” he said softly.

“Yes, I’m sure you are.  But what exactly are you sorry about?  That you slept with Helen, or that you slept with _my_ wife.  Because, Stephen, when I asked you why, what I really wanted to know was why would you do that to _me_?  Did my friendship mean that little to you?  _Does_ it mean that little to you?”

“Of course it doesn’t!  Your friendship means everything to me.  There hasn’t been a day in the last eight years when I haven’t felt bad about what happened, when I haven’t wanted to tell you.  All can say is, I thought I was in love with her.  And people in love do stupid things.”

“So you’re saying you weren’t in love with her?”

Stephen sighed.  “I don’t know.  I might have been.  Or I might not.  But I’m definitely not any more.  I don’t love Helen.”

Nick looked visibly relieved at this pronouncement, but only for a second.  Still, it was enough to give Stephen some hope that they might, after all, be alright.

“Well, that makes two of us, then,” said Nick.  “And I need to tell Claudia…”

“Nick, who is this Claudia?” Stephen interrupted, feeling like it might be wise to try and steer the subject away from Helen.

Now it was Nick’s turn to sigh.  He suddenly seemed very tired.  “She worked on the project with us,” he said.  “Lester’s deputy, if you like.  She was there when I stepped through the anomaly, and gone when I came back.  And I don’t know why.”

“But how…”

“Stephen, don’t.  I can’t talk about this with you.  Not now.  Before, maybe, but not now.”  Nick looked at Stephen, his weariness etched deeply on his face.  “I can’t sack you, because we need you for the project.  But we can’t go back to how we used to be, either.”

“But, Nick…”

“That’s the way it has to be, Stephen.  I’ll see you at work.”

Stephen recognised a dismissal when he heard one, and he rose to his feet.  But he had to give it one more try.

“Nick, I…”

“Good-bye, Stephen.”

*   *   *   *   * 

Early next morning, Nick wandered back into his study and turned on his computer.  He tried not to look at the empty sofa where, normally, Stephen would have been sprawled, uncomfortable and yet fast asleep in the too-small space.  Under normal circumstances, they would have stayed up late discussing the Claudia problem, and figuring out what to do about it.  Nick would have convinced Stephen that he wasn’t crazy, and Stephen would have provided a sounding board for ideas and plans.

But that was before.  Now Nick had no one to bounce ideas off except himself.  Which was precisely what he had been doing all last night.  Now it was six o’clock, and he had finally come to the conclusion that he was getting no more sleep.  He needed to be doing something constructive.

And since Lester had denied him any governmental resources, that meant the Internet.  If it took the next five years, he was going to trawl the World Wide Web searching for a mention of Claudia Brown.

It didn’t take five years.  In fact, it barely took five hours.  Five hours to establish that the Claudia Brown he had known apparently didn’t exist.  Oh sure, there were lots of Claudia Browns on the Internet, but not one of them was the one he was looking for.  He had tried every search parameter he could think of, from the personnel of the civil service to the secret desire she had once mentioned about being a teacher.  He had even used her guilty pleasure for trashy romantic movies.  But even the ‘West London Danielle Steele Movie Society’ didn’t have a Claudia Brown listed on its membership page.

Nick didn’t want to give up, but he honestly had no idea where to go next.  He hadn’t thought that his search would be over quite this quickly – he had hoped he would have at least a few leads by now.  Instead, he had nothing.

Reluctant to leave the computer, however, Nick remained at his desk, wracking his brains for inspiration.  Then, as his gaze wandered around the room, his eyes alighted on the calendar that was hanging on the wall by the bookcase.  It was a freebie from work, showing various British landscapes throughout the seasons.  Nick didn’t know what month it was currently showing – he always forgot to flip the pages over – but the current landscape was one of the Cotswolds.

Hang on a minute – hadn’t Claudia once told him that she had lived in the Cotswolds when she was a small child?  It had only been a passing mention, made as they were driving through the picturesque scenery to yet another anomaly site, but Nick was sure he was right.  Now, if he could only remember the name of the village…  Great something-or-other, wasn’t it?  Richborough?  Rissenden?  Rissington!  Great Rissington!

It was a long shot, but it was the only thing Nick had left.  He went back to work, looking up everything he could think of relating to Great Rissington and the Cotswolds.  Eventually he found himself on the archive pages of the Bourton Herald, newspaper of the nearest town, Bourton-on-the-Water.

Claudia had told him she had moved away from the area when she was five, so he concentrated his search on the newspapers from 1979 and before, looking for anything that might give him a clue to…well, anything.

It took another hour-and-a-half, but he eventually came across something that looked at least halfway promising, albeit tragic and heart-wrenching as well.

It seemed that, in 1978, Great Rissington, Bourton, and the surrounding area had witnessed a spate of disappearances, mainly small children and pets.  There had been no clues or leads, and the community had been left devastated and shaken.  And the very first child to have disappeared was a five-year-old girl named Claudia Brown.

For a few moments Nick just sat and stared at the grainy black-and-white photograph of the girl.  In the picture she was smiling and happy, and he had no doubt that this was the image that had been used on a hundred ‘Missing’ posters around the area.  But what had happened to her?  Had she run away?  Been kidnapped?  Or had she been killed?  Nobody knew.  But the fact that so many other children had also disappeared, never to be seen again, strongly suggested the latter possibility.

Nick swallowed.  The thought that a young Claudia Brown might have been murdered was deeply disturbing.  It seemed to make his memories of Claudia the woman all the sharper, as if his brain was trying to compensate for the fact that she was now gone.

But still, at least this proved that Claudia had existed, even if she was now…dead.  What it didn’t explain was how his trip through the anomaly had caused this change in the world.  What had he done that meant Claudia had never got to grow up, had never become the beautiful, intelligent, caring woman he had known?

He needed more information.  But the Bourton Herald had nothing to say beyond the usual facts of the disappearance, descriptions of the child and her home life, and information about who to contact if readers had any possible leads for the police.

There was only one other thing he could do.  He would have to go to Great Rissington and poke around.  There might be people living there still who remembered what had happened twenty-nine years ago.  And besides, it was the only lead he had.

Grabbing his mobile as he headed out the door, he punched the first speed-dial number on the pad, only to disconnect the call two seconds later when he realised that he had automatically been about to call Stephen.  Normally he could have counted on Stephen to come with him on a trip like this, or at the very least cover for him with various other university professors.  But now he couldn’t count on Stephen for anything – he would have to do this one alone.

Still, he supposed he should let someone know where he was going.  Stephen would have been his first choice and, ironically, Claudia would have been his second.  But neither of them was an option any more.  So who was he going to call?  Lester was definitely out – the last thing Nick needed was his condescending sarcasm.  Or worse, an attempt to stop his investigation.  That only left Abby and Connor.  Nick smiled wryly as he keyed in Abby’s number.  They were last people he would have expected to have to inform of his whereabouts.  Still, at least Abby could be relied on to raise the alarm if he didn’t come back, and Connor would definitely be supportive of a mad mission to find a woman who had been missing for twenty-nine years.  In fact, he would probably want to come along.  Nick suddenly prayed that it would be Abby who answered the phone – the last thing he needed was to have to fend off Connor’s well-meaning but unwanted offers of company.

As luck would have it, neither of them answered the phone – it went straight to voicemail instead.  Nick left a short message telling them where he was going and why, along with a promise to call again if he was going to be away for longer than a couple of days.  Then, not really knowing what else to add, he rang off.

*   *   *   *   * 

Nearly four hours later, after one huge traffic jam on the M4, and one quick stop for food and coffee, Nick arrived in the village of Great Rissington.  It looked just like a picture postcard – all thatched cottages and scrupulously mowed village-greens.  Even the pub looked like something from a cosy Sunday evening drama.  And luckily, this pub also did bed-and-breakfast, and had vacancies.  Nick checked in, smiling slightly at the perfect view outside his bedroom window, and then decided to return downstairs to the bar.  That seemed like the place to get all the gossip.

He wasn’t wrong.  The place was very much a local’s pub, but that didn’t mean they wouldn’t welcome a stranger into their midst.  After all, it meant a fresh set of ears for all their stories.

It took half-an-hour of tales about the village show, neighbourly disputes, and local scandal before anyone thought to ask Nick why he was visiting the village.  And when he told them his ready-prepared story about writing a book on unsolved crimes, they were only too ready to provide him with all the information he could want.  The fact that most of it was rumour and hearsay didn’t seem to worry them one iota.

“Yes, I remember that year well,” said one old man, whose name could have been Bob, or possibly Bill, and who Nick privately thought looked like he would have trouble remembering what he had for breakfast that morning.  “Terrible tragedy, it was.  All them little kiddies going missing like that.  Poof!  Just gone.  And no explanation was ever found.”

There followed a long debate between Bob (Bill?) and another man (Alf?) about what might have happened to the children.  Alf thought kidnapping, while Bob was of the more morbid opinion (and the one that Nick agreed with) that the kids were dead.  Nick listened to the debate patiently, but when it finally ended (with neither man agreeing with the other), he was still no nearer to any concrete evidence about Claudia’s disappearance.

“You’d think the families would have moved away after that,” finished Bob eventually.  “Why would they want to stick around, after all?”

“You mean they didn’t move away?” asked Nick, feeling a faint glimmering of hope.

“Most of them did, yes,” replied a new voice.  It was Mrs. Wheelock, the landlady of the pub.  She winked at Nick as she addressed him, clearly hoping to save him from another long digression on the pros and cons of moving out of Great Rissington.  Nick smiled gratefully back at her, then gestured for her to continue.

“Yes, most of them moved away.  Couldn’t bear to stay in the village where their children had vanished.  And who can blame them?  I wouldn’t stay.  Too many memories.  But one family did stay.  The Browns.  I guess they felt they needed to hang on to the memories of their little girl.”

Nick sat bolt upright in his seat.  “You mean Claudia Brown’s family?  The first little girl who disappeared?  They stayed?”

“That’s right,” said Mrs. Wheelock.  “Of course, only her mother’s left now.  The father upped-sticks and went off about twenty-five years ago, four years after Claudia went missing.  The tragedy destroyed their marriage in the end.”

“But Mrs. Brown still lives here?  In the village?” said Nick excitedly.

“Yes, she lives in Rose Cottage, at the end of Pennyhill Lane,” replied Mrs. Wheelock.  Then she looked at Nick sharply.  “You’re not going to go disturbing her, are you?  Because she’s never got over her little girl vanishing.  The last thing she needs is some nosy writer dredging up bad memories again.”

“No, of course not,” said Nick, feeling bad about the lie, and about the necessity of disturbing Mrs. Brown, but knowing both were necessary nonetheless.

“Good.  Because that kind of thing wouldn’t make you very popular around here.”

Nick smiled nervously at Mrs. Wheelock, and at Bob and Alf, suddenly experiencing that little-village solidarity that hinted at strangers mysteriously vanishing after asking too many questions.

Mentally, he shook himself.  That was ridiculous.  Where did he think he was – in an Agatha Christie novel?

But his denial seemed to have put the local residents at their ease, and when Mrs. Wheelock pressed him to have some dinner, he didn’t feel like he could decently refuse.  Shortly afterwards, however, he made his excuses and returned to his room, trying to decide how best to approach Mrs. Brown the next day.

*   *   *   *   * 

At 10:30 the next morning Nick was to be found standing outside Rose Cottage, trying to summon up the nerve to knock on the door.  He had come up with an alternative story to tell Mrs. Brown (he didn’t think the ‘nosy writer’ act would go down too well with her), but now, in the cold light of day, any story that he could tell her seemed lame, not to mention totally disrespectful of her loss.

He was just making up his mind to leave Mrs. Brown in peace and go back to the pub to try and wring some more details out of Mrs. Wheelock, when the front door of Rose Cottage opened and a woman stepped out.

Mrs. Brown couldn’t have been much more than fifty-five, but she looked much older.  Grief and heartache had aged her prematurely, and if Nick hadn’t been told she lived alone, he would have assumed that this was an elderly housekeeper, or something like that.

Mrs. Brown saw Nick immediately, and her eyes narrowed with suspicion.  Nick wondered if someone from the pub had warned her about the writer staying there, and he was hastily preparing a defence when she spoke.

“Yes?  Can I help you?”

She didn’t know who he was, then.  It was understandable that she would naturally be suspicious of people loitering outside her house, given what had happened to her daughter.

“Hello, Mrs. Brown.  My name is…Nicholas Hart.”  He didn’t know why he had suddenly decided to give a false name, but it was too late now (he also didn’t know why he had used Stephen’s surname, but that was a question for another time).  “I’m with the police.”

“And what do the police want with me?”  The woman’s suspicion was still in evidence, and Nick tried to reassure her.

“I work on old, unsolved crimes.  Try to look at them from a fresh perspective, if you like.  See if there was anything missed in the original investigation.”

“You’re investigating my Claudia?”  Suddenly the woman’s whole attitude had changed, and Nick felt like a total arsehole when he saw the hope that lit her face.  Still, he reasoned to himself, if talking to Mrs. Brown here today helped him bring Claudia back, then the woman would have her daughter back, and wouldn’t remember that any of this had happened.  It was small comfort, but it was all he had.

“Yes I am, Mrs. Brown.”

Oh, please, call me Julia,” she replied.  “Won’t you come in, Mr. Hart?  A cup of tea, perhaps?”

“Thank you, Julia.” 

Nick followed her into the house, and then sat rather uneasily in the front room while Julia Brown bustled around with teapots and biscuits.  Rose Cottage was like stepping into a time-warp.  Nick reckoned that it hadn’t been decorated since the seventies, probably since Claudia had disappeared.  Everywhere he looked was a clash of browns, oranges, and acidic greens, in patterns that had to be seen to be believed.

“Do you take sugar, Mr. Hart?” Julia called from the kitchen.

“No, thank you,” Nick replied.  He was wondering how best to bring up the topic of Julia’s lost daughter again, not wishing to seem callous or cold-hearted,

Luckily, however, Julia Brown brought it up herself as soon as she came back into the front room.  Setting a mug of rather milky tea down in front of Nick, she settled herself in an armchair opposite him, her gaze drifting to the mantelpiece.  Nick’s eyes followed hers, and he found himself looking at a picture of the young Claudia.  It was the same one as had been used in the newspaper report, only this time in colour.  Claudia looked even happier and more smiley in this version of the picture, if that was possible, and Nick felt a fresh wave of grief for a life cut short by who-knew-what strange forces.

“It’s been nearly thirty years,” murmured Julia softly.  “Thirty years, and I still hope that one day she’ll walk back in the door saying it was all a big mistake.”  She looked at Nick.  “I expect you think I’m stupid, don’t you, Mr. Hart?  Everyone round here does, that much I know.  Silly Mrs. Brown.  Doesn’t she realise that her daughter’s dead?  They never say it out loud, but I can see it in their eyes.”

“I don’t think you’re silly, Julia,” said Nick, thinking about how long he had hoped for Helen to return.  “Hope is never silly.”

Julia looked at him for a second longer.  “Thank you,” she said gratefully.  “Thank you for saying that, even if you don’t mean it.”

“Can I ask you what happened to your daughter?” said Nick gently.  “I’ve read the reports, but it always helps to have a first-hand view.”

Julia swallowed once, and then her resolve seemed to stiffen.  “It was August,” she began tremulously.  “All the kids were on their summer holidays.  Running wild they were, from dawn to dusk.  But what’s wrong with that?  We used to run wild too, when I was a girl.  Never did us any harm.  Fresh air and exercise is good for you, that’s what I always say.”

Nick smiled in agreement, encouraging her to go on.

“Well, there was one place, down in the woods, that they used to go to a lot.  They played Cowboys and Indians, hide-and-seek, things like that.  Maybe I shouldn’t have let Claudia go, her being only five, but the older kids were there too, and they always looked after her.  Except one day they came back and said they couldn’t find her.  They’d been playing hide-and-seek, she’d been hiding, and they just…couldn’t find her.”

“Of course, I told them not to be so silly, and to go and look again.  She’d just found some really good hiding place, and was laughing at them all, I said.  But they came back again, still without her, and I started to worry.  After that, we had teams of police with dogs combing the woods for days.  I put up hundreds of ‘Missing’ posters.  But no one ever saw her again.”

Julia Brown’s voice broke on the last word, and Nick swung his gaze away from the picture on the mantel, which he had been studying again, to see that she was crying.  Hastily, he got up and offered her a tissue, standing awkwardly by as she sniffed and hiccoughed her way back to relative calmness.

“I’m so sorry,” she said when she could speak again.  “I’m a silly old fool.”

Nick crouched down in front of her.  “It’s me who should be sorry,” he said firmly.  “Making you remember all that again.  I’m so sorry for your loss, Julia.”

Julia smiled a watery smile.  “Thank you, Mr. Hart.”

“Call me Nick.”

“Thank you, Nick.”

Nick sighed.  Considering that he already felt like a horrible person, he really didn’t want to ask Julia his final question.  He had no desire to upset her again.  But he had to know.

“Julia, do you know where this place in the woods is, where the children used to play?”

“Yes, I do.  It’s beyond the end of the lane, across the field.  There’s a path that leads to the clearing.  You can’t miss it.”  She paused.  “I can see the woods from the kitchen window.  That makes it even worse, somehow.  She was only a quarter of a mile away, and yet she still vanished into thin air.  How can that be?”

“I don’t know, Julia.  I really don’t know.  But I promise you – I will find some answers for you.  I promise.”

*   *   *   *   * 

Nick walked away from Rose Cottage wondering if he had just made a promise he wouldn’t be able to keep.  Were there any answers to find?  He knew that his little trip through the anomaly was ultimately responsible for Claudia’s disappearance, but would he really be able to solve the riddle of exactly what had happened just by going and looking at a forest clearing?

But Nick knew he wouldn’t just be looking at a forest clearing.  He was beginning to have an inkling of what might have happened to the young Claudia Brown, and all the other missing children.  And the inkling wasn’t a happy one.

Following the path through the woods, Nick was immediately swallowed up by the silence and stillness.  There were no kids playing here now – the area must still have a stigma attached to it, despite the number of years that had passed since Claudia’s disappearance.

It only took him five minutes to reach the clearing (so close to her house, she was – but not close enough).  The path had become somewhat overgrown, but it still formed a clear route through the trees.  The clearing was likewise becoming choked by the undergrowth, but Nick could see at once why it had been a popular place for children to play.  There were plenty of hiding places in the knarled trunks and dense bushes that surrounded the open space, and clearing itself was an ideal area for more energetic games, with no adult eyes to watch.  One enterprising kid had even constructed a rope-swing in one of the trees – Nick could see the tattered remains of rope dangling from a low branch.

Doubtless the children had known the clearing, and the woods surrounding it, extremely well, but it would still have been easy for a small child to get lost.  However, some sixth sense told Nick that this was not what had happened to Claudia.  Wanting to test his theory, he pulled a compass out of his pocket and laid it flat on the palm of his hand.

He wasn’t really expecting anything to happen, and for a moment nothing did, the needle swinging gently as the compass settled again after its movement.

But when the needle didn’t stop swinging, Nick suddenly realised that he was seeing the evidence that supported his theory.  The compass wasn’t behaving in the wild manner that normally indicated the presence of an anomaly, but the lazy movement to-and-fro definitely pointed to something amiss with the local magnetic field.  A signpost that an anomaly had once been here, perhaps?  Or that one was going to appear soon? The fact that the anomaly back in the Forest of Dean had been behaving so strangely strongly hinted that something had changed in its fundamental nature.  Maybe that change was now causing magnetic fluctuations at anomaly sites even when there was no actual anomaly to be seen.

In any case, Nick was taking the swinging compass as confirmation that his theory about the young Claudia’s disappearance was at least partially correct.  Now all he had to do was convince Lester.


	2. Chapter 2

Lester was having one hell of a day.  Half of the military squad assigned to the anomaly project had been wiped out in one fell swoop by these future-predators, including Captain Ryan, the soldier that Lester privately considered to be one of the most capable he had ever met.  The anomaly itself was now behaving erratically, and who knew what it was going to do next.  The civilian scientists were apparently having personal issues, which Lester was sure would interfere with the project.  And, to top it all off, Cutter had now gone AWOL with barely a word to anyone.  Miss Maitland had mentioned something about him ‘following a lead’, but she hadn’t been any more forthcoming than that, so now, for all Lester knew, Cutter could have fallen through a hole in the universe.

He had sent the remainder of Cutter’s team back to the anomaly site to monitor proceedings, hinting very strongly to the lot of them that they were not to let personal problems get in the way of the work.  Although, judging by the looks Maitland had been giving Hart throughout the morning briefing, he didn’t hold out much hope for those instructions being followed.

Lester sighed, leaning back in his chair and scrubbing at his tired eyes with his hands.  Why didn’t he have an underling to help him deal with all of this?  Someone to do all the legwork, while he took all the credit?  His lips twisted in a wry smile.  According to Cutter, he should have such a person.  This Claudia Brown – it sounded as if she had fitted the bill rather nicely.

Right on cue, almost as if he had been reading Lester’s thoughts, Cutter burst into his office, babbling something about missing children, past anomalies, attacks by the predators, and a whole load of other stuff that Lester didn’t even bother trying to follow.  He waited until Cutter had run out of steam, and then fixed him with a cold stare, raising one eyebrow into the bargain.

“Don’t you knock, Professor?”

Cutter looked like he was about to burst a blood vessel at Lester’s total indifference to his ramblings, but he reigned himself in, taking a few deep breaths while Lester proceeded to examine his nails, continuing to show a total lack of interest.

When Cutter finally seemed like he would be able to string together a coherent sentence, Lester switched his attention away from his hands back to the man standing in front of him.

“That’s better.  Now, you were saying?”

“I think I might have a lead on Claudia Brown,” Cutter began.  “I searched for her on the Internet, and found a record of a child of that name having gone missing from her home in a Cotswold village.  I’ve visited the site, and talked to her mother, and I think she was killed by a creature that came through an anomaly.  Specifically, one of the future-predators.”

“And you are basing this conclusion on what, exactly?”

“There were strange magnetic readings at the site.  And the method of her disappearance points to one of the predators.  There were plenty of other children around at the time, and yet she vanished without a trace, without leaving a clue behind.  We’ve all seen how these things hunt – they’d be more than capable of tracking down a child and taking her without anybody seeing or hearing a thing.  They could have carried her back through the anomaly, which then closed.  And she’d be gone forever – not even a body to find.”

Lester considered for a few seconds.  “But why do you assume that it was one of the predators that killed this girl?” he asked.  “If your version of the events of two days ago is true, Ms. Brown wasn’t gone until you came back through the anomaly, by which point both the predators and all their offspring were dead.  When would they have had a chance to kill this person?”

“You’re thinking of time as being linear,” explained Cutter patiently.  “I think the anomalies have proved that isn’t the case.  If even one of the predator babies was left alive in the Permian, it could have found an anomaly that led to Claudia’s childhood at _any_ _time_ after we left it there.  But because the Permian is in our past, it wouldn’t matter if it took them a hundred years to find that anomaly.  By the time Helen and I came back through to our time, the consequences would have already occurred – the predator could have found and killed the young Claudia.  Therefore she would have disappeared from our current timeline.”

Holding up a hand, Lester rubbed his eyes again.  “Please stop, Professor.  You’re giving me a headache.”  He paused.  “Let’s say I believe this outlandish theory of yours – that Claudia Brown should be here, but she isn’t because she’s been killed by a predator from the future.  How do you propose to rectify the situation?”

“We’ll have to go back through the anomaly, find the offspring that we missed, and eliminate it before it has a chance to get to Claudia.”

“That,” said Lester, picking up the phone, “might be more difficult than you think.”

*   *   *   *   * 

Stephen couldn’t sit still.  He had tried, but within two minutes he was back to his pacing, walking up and down in front of the anomaly, unable to settle to anything.  He knew he was annoying everyone around him – Abby, Connor, the Special Forces soldiers.  Hell, even the trees probably wished he’d stay still for more than sixty seconds.

But Stephen didn’t care.  After all, what else was he supposed to do?  It was all very well for Lester to send him and the others back here to monitor the anomaly, but when that monitoring primarily consisted of checking on the magnetic field fluctuations every few minutes – a job for no more than two people, and probably only one – it was hard not to feel superfluous to requirements.

It was doubly annoying because everyone _knew_ that there was something funny going on with the anomaly.  And not just in a ‘getting bigger and sparkling more brightly’ way.

The day before, Captain Jacobs, Ryan’s second-in-command, had been instructed by Lester to take a small team back through the anomaly to recover Ryan’s body.  Cutter might have thought he was being noble by burying Ryan, Lester had said, but a dead Special Forces soldier needed to go through the proper procedures, whether he had died in the Permian or not.

Stephen had argued strongly against this course of action.  After all, Cutter and Ryan himself had seen Ryan’s bones in the Permian the very first time they had been there.  That meant that nobody had removed the body, and by doing so they would be changing their past, probably creating an uncontrollable paradox, or something like that.

But Lester hadn’t listened to him.  In fact, Stephen was getting the distinct impression he was in disgrace, and the only reason he was still on the project was because so few people knew about the anomalies, and they needed all the people they could get.  He was, however, surprised that Lester would give such credence to personal issues, when he had previously appeared not to care about them at all.  Look at his treatment of Cutter and Helen – a prime example of peoples’ personal feelings not coming first.

Or maybe he was imagining it.  Maybe Lester wasn’t listening to him because he was Lester, and he thought he knew best.  It wouldn’t be the first time.

Whatever the reason, Stephen’s protests had fallen on deaf ears, and Jacobs had proceeded to lead his team into the Permian to bring back Ryan’s body.

Except they hadn’t been able to find it.  In fact, there had been no sign of the conflict with the future-predators at all.  No campsite, no burial, no nothing.  The soldiers had dismissed this as the anomaly playing tricks again.  After all, it had already led them to two different points in Permian history, why not a third?  Except that, as Stephen had pointed out when they got back, the last time the anomaly had switched between points in time, it had sealed off and then reopened in between.  This time it had done it without closing down.  This was something new.

Still, Jacobs hadn’t been willing to give up that easily.  So, later in the day, he and his team had gone through again, hoping that the anomaly would have jumped back to the right point in time again.

But they had returned almost immediately.  Apparently, the anomaly _had_ jumped in time again.  Only this time it had jumped to a different geological era entirely.  The soldiers weren’t qualified to say exactly _when_ they’d been, but from their descriptions of conifer and grass covered landscapes, as well as one soldier’s comment that it looked like _Jurassic Park_ , Stephen deduced that they must have been in the film’s namesake era.  There was no doubt about it – something strange was happening to the anomaly.

However, Stephen hadn’t had the chance to prove he was right, because, as soon as Jacobs phoned Lester with the latest developments, Lester had forbidden anyone else from going through the anomaly.  He had pointed out, quite sensibly as Stephen reluctantly thought, that if the prehistoric end of the anomaly was able to shift in time, what was to stop their end shifting also?  A team could go through, and find themselves coming home to a completely different time period.

Hence Stephen’s boredom.  He had nothing to do but walk up and down and annoy everyone.  That, and think about Nick.

Funnily enough, his thoughts about Nick mirrored his current activity.  They bounced backwards and forwards, and ultimately came to no conclusion.  They were as frustrating to him as his pacing was to everyone around him.

Stephen knew he had hurt Nick deeply.  He had known what he was doing was wrong even in the moment of doing it, but, as he had told Nick, he had thought he was in love, and people in love do stupid things.  Even stupid things that hurt their best friend in all the world.

At one time, Stephen had thought that Helen was his best friend.  And, while that illusion had been shattered pretty quickly, she had continued to be the most important person in his life, although possibly not for the right reasons.  Looking back, Stephen was ashamed of just how infatuated he had been with her.  He would have done anything for her.  She said “jump”, he said “how high?”  His obsession had bordered on unhealthy.  He had worshipped her and the ground she walked on.  Right up until the moment she had dropped him.

Nick had been right when he had said that Stephen was just convenient for Helen, although Stephen hadn’t wanted to admit that.  The years, and his grief at Helen’s disappearance, had dulled the pain and humiliation he had felt when she dumped him, but Nick’s bitter words had brought it all back.  He had realised at that point that she had been using him – in fact, she had practically said as much.  He had been hurt and disappointed, and had tried to persuade her to take him back – begged her, actually.  It had not been his finest moment, and Helen had given him that withering look she had perfected so well, and walked away from him.

Ironically, in the months that followed, it had been Nick that had helped him snap out of his lovesick daze.  Nick had spotted that Stephen was down about something, and even though Stephen wouldn’t tell him what it was, he had tried to take Stephen’s mind off it, keeping him busy and cheering him up.

This had left Stephen with a huge emotional dilemma.  On the one hand, Nick’s efforts to bring him out of his depression had actually worked quite well – Stephen had found it quite easy not to think about Helen for long stretches of time.  But, on the other hand, Nick being so nice to him was making the hard lump of guilt that was lodged somewhere in his stomach grow bigger every day.

But this situation hadn’t lasted for long.  Because, just five months after she had ditched him so mercilessly, Helen had disappeared.

And so it was Nick’s turn to be comforted and helped, and Stephen had fulfilled the role gladly, desperate for anything that would absolve him of his guilt.  Of course, nothing could absolve him entirely – he still felt a twinge of shame every time Nick mentioned Helen, which was pretty much every day.  But in trying to help Nick find his wife, and deal with his grief, he had begun to feel just a tiny bit better about what had happened.

From then on Nick had become the most important person in his life – and he had become the most important person in Nick’s.  They had become inseparable – first in their efforts to find Helen, but later in just abut everything else.  They worked together, they hung out together, they stayed up long into the night drinking, debating, or even watching the football.  Nick had by now adopted a sort of fatalistic outlook on their chances of finding Helen, and Stephen had adopted a similarly fatalistic attitude towards his betrayal.  If Nick was going to find out, he was going to find out, but Stephen didn’t see any point in telling him now.  It would only hurt him all over again, and besides, Stephen was incredibly reluctant to lose the best thing in his life.  He might have thought at one time that Helen fulfilled that role, but now he knew better.  He needed Nick in his life.

Of course, now that Nick actually _had_ found out about him and Helen, Stephen thought that maybe his fatalism on the subject had been a little misplaced.  It would have been far better if Nick had never learned the truth.  It didn’t need dredging up again.

But it was too late.  He had ruined his relationship with Nick forever, the thing that mattered most to him.  And, to top it off, everyone else was looking at him like he was some particularly disgusting form of cockroach.

Abby was especially good at this.  Granted, she probably had more reason for despising him than everyone else.  He had flirted with her – led her on, quite possibly, and had now apparently turned out to be some kind of love rat.  Stephen could understand why she looked at him with disgust.

He had tried to talk to her a couple of times today, but she had frozen him out with all the expertise of an Eskimo in the High Arctic.  And Connor had followed her lead – no surprises there.  So Stephen was left with nothing to do but think and pace.

Fortunately, however, someone was about to turn up and relieve Stephen’s boredom, as well as everybody else’s annoyance with it.  _Un_ fortunately, that someone was Nick Cutter, which meant that Stephen’s boredom was subsumed by something worse – his returning guilt.

Nick was shouting at them before he had even climbed out of his truck, wanting to know if what Lester had told him was true, demanding more details, expressing his astonishment at this most recent turn of events.  Stephen opened his mouth to confirm that the story was true, and to relate the events described by Captain Jacobs and his team.

But he was cut short when Nick very deliberately turned to Jacobs himself, asking the soldier to tell him what had happened.  This Jacobs proceeded to do, aided in some of the more technical stuff by Connor and Abby, who, although they hadn’t actually been through the anomaly themselves, nevertheless understood more of the science than the soldier.

Stephen could feel that distinct frosty feeling returning, and ruefully he wondered how long it was going to be before people started listening to him again.  Before Nick started listening to him again.  Because if nobody started paying attention to what he had to say, then he might as well leave the project for good.  There was no point in him being here if he was just going to become a spare part – no matter how top secret the project might be.

Then, suddenly, his wandering attention was captured again by something Nick was saying.

“…given his permission to take a small team through the anomaly and conduct a search.” 

The slight sarcastic edge to the word ‘permission’ told Stephen that Nick was referring to Lester as the one doing the giving, but he had no idea what it was that Nick was searching for.  Surely he couldn’t be thinking of trying to look for Ryan’s body again?

The looks on everyone else’s faces told him that they were just as bewildered as he was, but there was a slight element of ‘is this guy crazy, or what?’ to their expressions that suddenly gave Stephen a clue as to what Nick might be going on about.

“This has something to do with Claudia, doesn’t it?” he blurted abruptly.

Nick looked at him for the first time since arriving, but it was the kind of look a teacher reserves for a student who has asked a particularly stupid question.  “As I just said – yes, this has something to do with Claudia.  And before anyone else says anything,” he added, glaring at the others, “she _does_ exist, and I _do_ plan to bring her back.  Any questions?”

There was a short silence, in which it became quite clear that Connor, Abby, and Jacobs still thought Nick was completely mad.  Stephen decided that it was up to him to make the obvious enquiry, even it did earn him another withering look from Nick.

“Er…how exactly do you plan to do that?”

Nick sighed, but then appeared to conclude that he would have to explain himself if he wanted to get them on-side.  He gave them a brief rundown of everything he had found out on the Internet and during his visit to Great Rissington, outlining his theory that the young Claudia had been killed by one of the predators that they had inadvertently left behind in the Permian.

“So, as I said previously, Lester has given me permission to lead another team through the anomaly to try and find however many predators escaped, and remove them before they can get to Claudia,” he finished.

Everyone looked faintly incredulous at this story, including Stephen, although in the back of his mind something told him that there was also an inkling of truth to this wild tale.  Nick seemed very certain, and if Nick was certain that normally counted for a lot.

“But Professor, the anomaly keeps jumping time periods,” Connor pointed out bluntly, and perhaps a little unnecessarily.  “It would be hard enough to find precisely the right point in time even if it was just shifting throughout the Permian, but now it’s started moving between eras it could be nearly impossible.”  He looked a little nervous as he said this, as if afraid that Nick might bite his head off.

For just a second Nick looked defeated.  But then he pulled himself together again.  “Granted, this might take a while,” he said, ignoring the expressions around him that said ‘and the rest’.  “We’re just going to have to take it steadily, and carry out the plan in a structured manner.  We can be reasonably sure that, so long as the anomaly is only jumping between a finite number of destinations, it will eventually jump back to the point when we took the predators’ offspring through.  That point is our target.”  He knew that he was making a lot of assumptions about the anomaly’s current behaviour.  After all, who knew if it _did_ have a set number of end-points?  But he had to base his plan on something, and for the moment this was the most logical hypothesis he had.

Nick glanced towards the flickering light of the anomaly.  “But, first-things-first – we need to find out as much as we can about the anomaly’s current behaviour.  How often it changes time periods, whether there are any patterns to the changes – that kind of thing.”

“But the only way you can find out those things is by going through the anomaly itself,” protested Abby.  “That could be extremely dangerous.”

“I know,” replied Nick.  “That’s why I’m not going force any of you to help me.  If necessary I’ll go alone.  But we need to find out what we’re dealing with here, and going through the anomaly is the only way to do that.”

“I’ll help you,” Stephen suddenly heard himself saying.  His words surprised everyone, including himself, but he knew that this was the right thing to do.  And it wasn’t about ingratiating himself with Nick, he suddenly realised – it was unlikely that was going to happen any time soon.  But Nick needed someone to protect him if he was going to step through the anomaly with no idea of what to expect on the other side.  And that person was Stephen.  Stephen had been watching over Nick for the last eight years, and he wasn’t about to stop now.

For a moment he thought Nick was going to refuse him – say that he didn’t need him, or that someone else was better qualified.  He wouldn’t have been surprised by that response.  But then…

“Fine,” said Nick shortly, before turning away to confer with Captain Jacobs again.

And there didn’t seem to be anything more to say on the matter.  Stephen sat down, mentally running through everything he and Nick would need to take with them on their trips through the anomaly, while Connor and Abby wandered away towards the operations tent.  As they went, Stephen heard Abby mutter something to Connor. 

“But why did Lester give his permission, I wonder?  He doesn’t seem like the kind of person who would buy into some fantastic tale about changing timelines and missing women.”

Unfortunately for her, Nick overheard too.  “He doesn’t,” he said loudly, making the pair start and glance around guiltily.  “But when I told him that there might be predators still rampaging around in the Permian, he seemed to think that was a good enough reason to go back there – if we _can_ go back there.  If we recover Claudia in the process, then that’s just a bonus.  At least, that’s the way he sees it.”

*   *   *   *   * 

Two hours later, Stephen was standing in front of the anomaly, watching it apprehensively for any signs that it might be about to do something unexpected, like kill him.  It was rather like staring down the barrel of a gun, but at least you knew what a gun was about to do to you.  The anomaly wasn’t quite so predictable.

Still, Nick was determined to step through it, and therefore Stephen was determined to follow him.  He would watch Nick’s back even if it _did_ kill him.

After a great deal of debate, Nick had established a plan for investigating the anomalies.  It had been decided that they would go through every hour, on the hour, and record the time period they found on the other side.  They would stay for no more than five minutes in each instance, since nobody was yet sure whether the anomaly would become unfixed at this end as well as in the past.  No one wanted to return home only to find that ‘home’ was suddenly 30 million BC, or the year 100,675,000.

Nick hoped that, beginning like this, they could at least establish to a certain degree how often the anomaly was shifting.  After all, no one knew whether it had jumped time periods straight after Jacobs and his team had come back the first time, or just before they had gone through the second time.  It was even possible that the anomaly had shifted more than once during the intervening hours.  Going through every hour would give them a basis from which to work.

So now Nick and Stephen were preparing to step through for the first time, totally unsure of what they would find at the other end.  Captain Jacobs had tried to persuade Nick that he should go instead of Stephen, but Nick had flatly refused.  Stephen didn’t kid himself that this was because Nick preferred his company – he was obviously still feeling guilty about Ryan and the other soldiers, and was unwilling to risk any more of the Special Forces personnel, no matter how trained they might be.

Stephen tried not to think about the fact that Nick _was_ willing to risk him instead.  Those kind of thoughts did not engender warm and fuzzy feelings, and besides, Stephen knew Nick well enough to know that, however angry he was, he would never put Stephen in danger in such a callous and deliberate way.

No, the reason Nick was accepting Stephen’s presence was because he had volunteered, and Nick knew that he needed at least one other person with him for safety.  It would be madness to do this alone.

As Stephen stood staring at the anomaly, Nick walked up beside him, adjusting the straps on his pack.  Although they were only going to be gone for five minutes, they had catered for every contingency, bringing everything they might need, from food to weapons.  They didn’t know what kind of creatures they might encounter on the other side of the anomaly – they might have to defend themselves.  And the food was in case they got stuck, either due to the anomaly closing down behind them, or because when they returned they found they had actually arrived somewhere else.

Straps adjusted to his liking, Nick threw a quick glance at Stephen.  “You ready?” he asked.

“As I’ll ever be,” Stephen replied.  He turned his head to look back at Nick, but Nick was now staring at the anomaly, and didn’t catch his eye.

“Well, here we go,” muttered Nick, almost to himself.  He gestured to Connor, who was standing a little way behind them, holding a stopwatch.  “See you in five minutes.”  And without further ado he stepped forward, and was immediately swallowed up by the glittering facets of the anomaly.

Taking a deep breath, Stephen followed him.

*   *   *   *   * 

He could tell immediately that they were not in the same time period as Jacobs and his men had been in.  The trees were different to how they had described, and there were none of the grassy open spaces they had mentioned.  In fact, he and Nick were surrounded on all sides by thick forest comprised of totally unfamiliar trees.

Nick had immediately taken out some of his instruments, and was taking temperature and humidity readings, as well as collecting samples of air and soil.

Stephen slung his pack down next to Nick’s, and rummaged around in it for his video camera.  Locating it, he pulled it out and flipped it on.  While it was powering up he rummaged again, this time looking for his handgun, which, once he’d found it, he tucked into the waistband of his jeans, close to hand.  This dense forest was making him feel a little nervous, and he wanted to be prepared.

A beep from the camera told him it was ready to use, and he proceeded to take a 360º panoramic shot of the surrounding forest.  Not that there was really much to see, except trees and undergrowth.

When he was done videoing, Stephen took out his digital stills camera, snapping shots of all the different plants he could see.  This wasn’t really necessary in order to establish that they weren’t in the Permian – in fact, any idiot could tell that – but Nick had been determined that all these trips they were going to make wouldn’t go to waste.  They were going to collect as much data as they could about the different eras the anomaly led them too.

Having collected all his readings and samples, Nick straightened up, looking around at the forest that was on all sides.  “This isn’t the right place,” he muttered.

“Definitely not the Permian,” Stephen agreed.  “Where – sorry, _when_ – do you think we are?”

“Probably the Carboniferous,” replied Nick.  “Over 290 million years in the Earth’s past.”

“The Carboniferous?” queried Stephen, wanting to make sure he’d heard correctly.  “Isn’t that where that giant centipede thing came from?”  He rubbed his shoulder absently as he spoke, and something like sympathy seemed to flash in Nick’s eyes.  But it was gone an instant later, and Stephen couldn’t be sure he had really seen it.

“The Carboniferous was known for its larger-than-average insects,” confirmed Nick.  “Giant dragonflies being the most well-known.”  He looked around again.  “But I don’t think we’re going to see any of those in this environment.”  Checking his watch, he turned back to the anomaly.  “Time we were leaving.”

Seconds later they stepped back into the Forest of Dean, with a very relieved-looking Connor, Abby, and Jacobs all waiting for them.

“Not the right time period,” said Nick, in answer to Connor’s questioning look.  He tossed his samples to Abby as Stephen passed his cameras to Connor so he could download the images.  “We’ll have to try again in fifty-five minutes.”


	3. Chapter 3

Thirty-six hours later Nick was more tired than he’d ever thought he could be.  He felt like he’d been hopping backwards and forwards through the anomaly for his entire life, with barely a chance to rest or assimilate everything he’d seen.

They’d established fairly quickly that the anomaly’s destination-point was shifting at least once an hour, and for twenty-four hours he and Stephen had stepped though to behold landscapes so different to their own as to seemingly be from an alien world.

But something was odd.  By Nick’s reckoning, and despite the fact that they’d kept rigidly to their once-an-hour schedule, the only geological eras they seemed to end up in were the Carboniferous and the Permian.  And the latter rather more often than the former.

At first this had given Nick some hope.  It seemed that the anomaly, despite its new trend of era-hopping, was still more attached to the Permian than anywhere else.  This surely meant that it would only be a matter of time before they found the right part of the Permian, and could track down the predator babies.

But then he had started to wonder.  Going by Jacobs’s description of what he and his team had seen, it was almost certain that they had been in the Jurassic period.  But he and Stephen had seen neither sight nor sound of anything later than the Permian.  And that had worried Nick.  Clearly they were missing something.  And that meant that this might not be as easy as it had at first appeared.

Nick needed to work out if there was any pattern to way the anomaly moved.  Was it shifting chronologically, or reverse-chronologically, or in some other way?  But right now he obviously didn’t have all information he needed to make that assessment, and eventually he made the decision to increase the number of journeys they were making, stepping through the anomaly every half-hour instead of every hour.

He had been not particularly surprised to discover that his hunch had been correct, that the anomaly was in fact moving time periods at least once every thirty minutes.  Almost immediately he and Stephen had found themselves staring at a Jurassic landscape, although it was impossible to say if it was the same one, chronologically speaking, as the soldiers had seen.  But at least Nick felt he was making some progress, at last.

However, after another twelve hours of exhausting travelling to and fro, there was still no discernable pattern to the movements, and Nick was beginning to despair.  Some of their trips were still landing them in the Carboniferous or the Permian, while others were taking them to the Jurassic, and even the Palaeocene, the period when mammals had begun to dominate the Earth.  But then, all of a sudden, they stopped visiting the Jurassic, and started seeing the Cretaceous instead.  And they still hadn’t made any trips to the Triassic.  And why hadn’t they been anywhere later than the Palaeocene?

With a sinking feeling, Nick had realised that he still didn’t have all the data he needed to establish a pattern.  That initial twenty-four hours of only hourly trips meant that they had obviously missed certain eras altogether. 

And, then again, what if there was no pattern at all?  What if the movements were simply random?  In that case it didn’t matter that they had missed the earlier movements.  There would still be no way to predict when the anomaly might shift back to the Permian, never mind the specific time window within that era that he needed.

Raising his weary head, Nick gazed at the anomaly as it flickered and sparkled at him innocuously.  It had no idea of the havoc it was causing.  For a second Nick was tempted just to give up, to walk away.  It was hard to admit, but he knew that he couldn’t keep up this punishing routine for much longer.  If they didn’t make a breakthrough soon, either he or Stephen was going to drop.

Stephen.  Nick let his gaze drift across to where his assistant was stretched out under a tree, trying unsuccessfully to take a power-nap before their next trip.  The man had stuck to him like glue throughout this whole ordeal, and Nick couldn’t help but be impressed by his persistence.  The two of them had barely spoken a word to each other for the last day-and-a-half – in fact, they had barely even looked at each other – and yet Stephen wouldn’t give in.  It seemed he was determined to help Nick whether Nick wanted him to or not.

And in some ways Nick was glad that it was Stephen he had by his side for this task.  Their personal relationship might be shattered but, strangely, Nick knew he could still count on Stephen to watch his back.  Stephen would never let any harm come to him – at least, not of the physical type.

Almost as if he was aware he was being watched, Stephen finally gave up on trying to sleep and sat up, catching Nick’s eye for the first time in hours.  He looked as hellish as Nick felt, the dark circles under his eyes making his already somewhat angular features look gaunt and sharp.  And Nick suddenly felt a slight twinge of regret that he had allowed Stephen to put himself through this.

Stephen held Nick’s gaze for a second longer, and then hauled himself to his feet.  Nick suspected that he was going in search of yet another cup of coffee, as a substitute for sleep, and was therefore surprised when Stephen headed directly towards him.

Nick didn’t rise – he was too tired – and therefore felt at a slight disadvantage when Stephen stopped right in front of him, towering over him with every inch of his six-foot frame.  He was wearing a distinct ‘what have I got to lose?’ expression, and Nick suddenly realised that Stephen was about to try and persuade him to give up on this mad escapade.  And, moreover, Nick discovered that he was almost willing to be persuaded.

“Nick, this is madness,” began Stephen quietly, and slightly predictably.  “The only thing we’re accomplishing here is gathering enough data about prehistory to keep every palaeontologist in existence busy for the next twenty years.”

“I’m not giving up,” said Nick stubbornly.  “I won’t.”

“Nick, please.  This can’t go on.  Apart from anything else, our luck must be running out.  So far we haven’t run into anything that’s tried to kill or eat us, but it’s only a matter of time before we step through the anomaly into a dangerous situation.  And then what will we do?  We’ve got no back-up, no strategy, not even a guarantee that home will still be here when we come back.  You’re not going to find what you’re looking for this way.”

“So what other way do you suggest I try, then?” asked Nick, desperation tingeing his voice.  The rational side of his brain knew that Stephen was right, that this fruitless searching was getting them nowhere.  But the irrational side – the side that really didn’t want to listen to the best friend who had betrayed him – that side wanted to deny Stephen’s words and keep looking.

“I don’t know,” replied Stephen tiredly.  “I only know that neither you or I can keep this up much longer.”

“But I have to!” cried Nick suddenly, making the soldiers on the other side of the clearing jerk their heads around in alarm.  “What else can I do?  We have to find the predators before they find Claudia, or else she’s never coming back.  And I won’t find them by sitting here doing nothing.”

“Nick, look around you,” snapped Stephen, all but losing his temper in the face of Nick’s pig-headedness.  “Everyone here thinks you’re crazy.  Abby and Connor left hours ago, Lester hasn’t called since yesterday to check progress, and even Jacobs and Davis are only here because someone has to be on duty by the anomaly.”  He gestured over to the two soldiers, who were still watching them apprehensively, although they didn’t appear to be poised to charge in and break up a fight.  “You have this way of making people follow you, Nick, but even they won’t follow you this far.”

“And what about you, Stephen?” said Nick softly.  “Do you think I’m crazy?”  There was a steely glint in his eye that was telling Stephen to back off, right now.  But Stephen knew that he _really_ didn’t have anything to lose at this point, so it didn’t matter what he said.

“For what it’s worth, no I don’t,” he replied.  “Would I still be here if I did?  I’ve been following you for eight years, Nick Cutter, and I’m not about to stop now.”

“And what if I don’t want you following me any more?”  Nick was suddenly more irritated than he could say by Stephen’s presence.  The man had betrayed and hurt him in the worse way possible, and yet he was still hanging around regardless.  He just didn’t know when to quit.  “What are you still doing here, Stephen?  Why can’t you just leave me alone?”

“Because you need me.  Because, right at this moment, I’m the only one who believes in you.  You might not want me around, but I’m all you’ve got.”

And there it was.  The undeniable truth.  The ironic, laughable truth.  Nick’s only supporter was the person who had the power to hurt him most in all the world – someone who, at this moment, could cause him pain just by existing.

Nick sighed.  “You’re right,” he admitted.  “I hate to say it, but you are.”  He paused for a second, looking at Stephen as if he were a stranger.  Then he seemed to snap out of it, and sighed again.  “That doesn’t solve the problem of what to do next, though,” he continued.  “All I know is that I can’t give up yet.  There has to be a pattern to the anomaly’s movements – we just aren’t seeing it.  Maybe if we increased the frequency of our trips…”

He trailed off as he noticed Stephen’s faintly incredulous look.  “Please, Stephen,” he said quietly, hating himself for begging even as he spoke the words.  “Just for a little while.  A few trips – that’s all.  Just to see if I’m right.”

Stephen shrugged.  “Okay,” he said.  “I guess I can follow you that far.”

“Okay,” Nick echoed.  Suddenly re-energised, he scrambled to his feet.  “Our next time-slot is in five minutes.  Let’s see what we find this time.”

They found the Cretaceous.  Stephen, who was still working on the ‘it’s only a matter of time before we get eaten’ premise, kept a sharp look-out for everybody’s favourite carnivorous dinosaur – the Tyrannosaurus Rex – while Nick took his customary readings.  But once again nothing approached them, and they made it back through the anomaly in one piece.

Fifteen minutes later saw them back in exactly the same place.  Stephen knew it was the same place because Nick had put a notch in a tree stump on the previous occasion, and it was still there.  Same stump, same notch.

Stephen looked at Nick.  “Well, I guess this establishes that the anomaly is _not_ moving every quarter of an hour,” he said, unable to keep a faint hint of relief out of his voice.  He was already envisaging a hot shower followed by at least twenty-four hours sleep.

“We need to make sure,” Nick argued.  “We need to make at least two more trips to confirm the data.”

The visions of showers and beds vanished like a bubble popping.

But Stephen was to be proved correct.  The next trip put them in the early Permian – and so did the next one.

As they stood on a hillside, looking out over the arid landscape, Stephen wondered whether Nick was actually ever going to give up on this mad scheme.  His own influence meant nothing any more.  And the only other person who had ever been able to persuade Nick to do something was Helen.

“I must say, I didn’t expect to see you two again quite so soon.”

Stephen was swinging round, his gun raised, before his conscious mind even had time to assimilate what he was doing.  Hours of being on the alert for danger had tightened his nerves to the point where the rustle of a single leaf would have had him aiming to kill.  And an unexpected voice behind him struck him as slightly more of a threat than a rustling leaf.

Helen looked amused at Stephen’s reaction, although the amusement faded slightly when he didn’t lower his gun by even a fraction.

“Come on, Stephen, you don’t think _I_ could possibly a threat to you, do you?  After all, I have no reason to want to hurt you.”  Her lips quirked upwards into an expression that could have been called a smile, although it was almost to feral to be labelled in that way.

Stephen kept his own expression carefully neutral, still not lowering the gun, trying to figure out what on earth Helen was doing here.  Did she want to see the results of her little bombshell?  Or was it just coincidence?  There was no way she could possibly have known they’d be here at this time.  Or was there?

Despite Stephen’s startled reactions, and Helen’s callously flippant words, Nick still hadn’t moved a muscle.  He was still staring out over the Permian landscape, seemingly lost in his thoughts, and apparently oblivious to Helen’s presence.

“What do you want, Helen?”  Stephen decided it was up to him to carry on the conversation, even if he would rather Helen left as quickly as possible.  Preferably in the direction of a hundred million years ago.

“What makes you think I want something?  The last time I asked either of you for anything, I seem to recall both of you rejecting me.”  Helen’s gaze flickered between Stephen and Nick as she said this, but Stephen could detect no trace of hurt or remorse in her eyes.  Indeed, she seemed to be treating the whole thing as a bit of a joke, and that only confirmed to Stephen that she’d never really wanted either of them in the first place.

“Well, if you don’t want anything, then why don’t you just wend your merry little way back to wherever it is you’ve come from?”  Stephen was unable to keep the edge of irritation from his voice, even as he knew he was only giving Helen more ammunition to play with.

He was right.  Her grin widened, and she seemed about to say something.  But she was interrupted.

“She knows they’re still alive.”  Nick had turned away from the view at last, and was surveying Helen with poorly disguised hostility.

“Who are alive?” replied Helen, with an equally poor attempt at innocence.

Nick laughed – a short, sharp sound.  “Don’t play games, Helen,” he said wearily.  “There’s no one here who’s willing to join in with you any more.”

For the briefest of seconds Helen looked disconcerted, but then the feral grin was back in place.  “Okay,” she agreed.  “I know the predator’s offspring are still alive.  I knew it from the second I looked at the carnage created by the Gorgonopsid and counted only three bodies next to the box.”

“And you didn’t tell us because…?” Stephen enquired.

“Because she still wanted to follow them back to their home anomaly – to find the future.”  Nick answered for her, certain he was right.

“Well, you were one who said it was my ‘last great frontier’,” said Helen.  “I wasn’t going to give up on it that easily.”

“But you little plan hasn’t worked, has it?” said Nick abruptly, with the tone of one who has suddenly realised something important.  “You thought the babies would gravitate back towards their home, like so many of the prehistoric animals have.  But the prehistoric creatures work on instinct, while the predators work on intelligence.  You said yourself that they’re as clever as us.  Clever enough to realise that life would be much easier for them in prehistory than in wherever it is they come from.  There other creatures have developed defences against them.  Here nothing is prepared for them.  They can dominate with practically no effort at all.  They never went back to their home anomaly, did they?”

For the first time Helen allowed her confident façade to slip.  “No,” she acknowledged.  “They didn’t.  And, to make matters worse, they’ve found other anomalies to other time periods.  That’s why the anomalies are destabilising.  The predators are rampaging through time at will.  And that kind of thing doesn’t happen without having an effect.”  She looked as if she hoped this revelation would buy her back some standing with Nick – get them talking, at the very least.

But that wasn’t going to happen.  “I know,” Nick informed her.  “I know the predators have found other anomalies.  And they’ve done more than that.  They found Claudia.  They’ve killed her, Helen.  She was just a child.  A child!”

He was shouting now, and Helen looked a little taken aback, both by the vehemence of his words, and by their content.

“Did you know?” Nick added viciously.  “Did you know what they were going to do?  Could you have stopped it?  Could you have saved her?”  He was so angry now that he was moving towards Helen – involuntarily, almost, as if he didn’t realise what he was doing.  Stephen saw the intent in his eyes, and quickly stepped between them.

“Nick, stop,” he said quietly, authoritatively.  “She didn’t know.  You can see she didn’t know.”

It was true.  Helen’s face showed a total lack of comprehension.  Stephen quickly explained to her Nick’s theory about Claudia and the predators, and for the first time in a long time her face showed something like sympathy.

“Nick, I’m sorry,” she said softly.  “I didn’t know what had happened to Claudia.”  She spoke with knowledge in her voice, and Stephen was momentarily surprised that she seemed to know who Claudia was.

 _But of course she would_ , he told himself.  _She was with Nick when they took the babies through the anomaly.  She wouldn’t be affected by the changes they caused._

But then Helen’s face hardened, and the woman who had left them grieving for eight years without a second thought was back.

“Still, it’s nice to know what you think of me,” she retorted.  “Believing me capable of standing aside while innocent children are killed.  That’s low, Nick.”

“I don’t know what you’re capable of any more,” replied Nick tiredly.  “I haven’t known for a long time.  Now, did you actually want anything from us, or is this little meeting just a lovely coincidence?”

But Stephen was having a realisation all of his own.

“She knew,” he blurted suddenly.  “She knew we were looking for the predators, and she was hoping we’d lead her to them.  She’s been watching us this whole time.”  He looked at Helen.  “The predators disappeared from the part of the Permian where we left them, didn’t they?” he said shrewdly.  “And because of the anomalies’ destabilisation, you couldn’t use whatever little system you normally use to predict where they were going and follow them.  And then you found out we were searching for them too, and decided to watch us on the off-chance that we’d have more luck than you.”

Helen knew she’d been caught out.  “Yes,” she snapped.  “Okay.  I admit it.  I found myself back in your time period, more by luck than by judgement.  I saw what you were doing, and decided to keep tabs on you to see what you came up with.”

“But how did you follow us here?” queried Stephen.  “The anomaly is guarded at all times.”

“By Tweedle-dum and Tweedle-dee?” said Helen scornfully.  “Those two are so lax a Gorgonopsid could have sneaked past them and they wouldn’t have noticed.”

“Well, no more,” said Nick suddenly.  “You’re not going to follow us any more.  We’re going home now, and if you try to follow us again, I’ll get ‘Tweedle-dum’ and ‘Tweedle-dee’ to shoot you.”

There was nothing in his face or his voice that suggested he was joking, but Stephen didn’t want to believe that he would actually follow through on such a threat.  And yet he sensed that Nick might, just might, do exactly that.  He felt like he was seeing the real Nick Cutter for the first time since this whole debacle had begun.  He was seeing underneath the façade to the man who had been betrayed by his wife and his best friend, and who had lost the first woman he had got close to in eight years.  _This_ Nick Cutter wouldn’t hesitate to do what he had just threatened.

Nick had turned away, back towards the anomaly, and Stephen hastened to catch up.  Looking back in the direction he had come, he could still see Helen silhouetted against the sky on the top of the hill, her shape becoming rapidly smaller as they moved further away.  Then, between one blink and the next, she was gone.

*   *   *   *   * 

Sitting wearily in Lester’s office, Nick listened to Stephen arguing Helen’s case.  He was passionate and persuasive, and Lester finally appeared to be listening to him.

He tried not to, but Nick couldn’t help but think bitterly that Stephen seemed much more sure in his conviction about Claudia’s disappearance and the survival of the predators now that Helen had confirmed it.  He knew his thoughts were irrational, and not completely fair – after all, would he have believed his own story if someone else had told it to him? – but Stephen’s defence of Helen still rankled.

Although, making a last ditch effort to be reasonable, Nick conceded that Stephen wasn’t really defending Helen.  He was simply using her confirmation as a way to make Lester see sense and devote more resources to finding the predators.  And once again, despite her evasiveness and duplicity, it was Helen that Lester believed, and not Nick.  Only now that he had corroboration from Nick’s erstwhile spouse was the civil servant apparently willing to throw some weight behind the plan to hunt down the predators.

Nick knew he should have been happy about this.  The more people they had looking, the more likely it was that they would accomplish their goal.

But Nick didn’t have the energy to be happy.  He didn’t have the energy to be anything much, right now.  All he wanted to do was sleep.

After their altercation with Helen, Nick and Stephen had returned to the present, and Nick had finally allowed Stephen to persuade him to call a halt to their exploration of the anomalies.  Not that it took much persuasion.  Talking to Helen seemed to have sapped the last bit of strength he possessed, and he could barely see straight, never mind walk or think straight.  He had conceded that they both needed rest and a chance to regroup.

But then Lester had called, suddenly demanding the update that he hadn’t seen fit to request previously.  So Nick and Stephen had dragged themselves back to the Home Office to report on their progress, and enlighten him as to Helen’s confirmation that at least two of the predator babies had survived.

As Stephen’s words washed over him, Nick felt his head beginning to droop.  He knew he should stay awake, add his own input to the debate, but he just couldn’t keep his eyes open any more.

“Nick?  Nick?”

His eyes snapped open to behold Stephen looking down at him, his own gaze reflecting something like sympathy.  In the background, Lester was wearing his usual supercilious expression, mixed with a clear desire to get these mad academics out of his office.

“You need sleep,” Stephen pronounced firmly, although his authority was somewhat marred by the yawn that added several extra syllables to the last word.

“I know,” replied Nick tiredly, lacking the energy for an argument.

“Come on, I’ll drive you home.”

“No, thank you.  I’ll catch a cab.”  The rebuff was clear in Nick’s voice, although Stephen didn’t look very surprised by it.  The offer had clearly been based more on hope than an expectation of it being accepted.

He just couldn’t deal with Stephen at the moment.  Their efforts to decipher the behaviour of the anomalies, and find the predator babies, had reunited them briefly, but that didn’t mean that Nick was going to forget everything that had happened.  And, by the look in his eyes, Stephen hadn’t really expected him to.

“Fine.  Just make sure you get some sleep, okay?”

Nick didn’t reply this time, instead heading for the door, acknowledging Lester with only the briefest of nods as he left.  As he closed the door behind him, he heard Stephen start arguing logistics and resources again, and thought briefly to wonder when Stephen was planning on getting his own much-needed rest.

*   *   *   *   * 

Talking to Lester was like talking to a brick wall, Stephen concluded several hours later.  A particularly solid brick wall, albeit one with snappy suits and an overwhelmingly hideous taste in ties.

He and Nick (well, okay, mainly he) had finally convinced Lester once and for all of the continued existence of some of the predator offspring, and he had agreed that they needed to be rounded up and ‘disposed of’, as he so eloquently put it.

However, that was where the agreement stopped.  After Nick had finally gone home to get some sleep, Stephen had tried to get the civil servant to make good on his promises of more resources, so they could restart the search as soon as possible.

But Lester had refused to sanction any ongoing effort until they had at least some idea of where, or _when_ , to look.  He was insisting that Cutter analyse the data they had already gathered to see if he could find a pattern to the anomaly’s movements, so they might have at least a chance of looking in the right place.

Stephen had never really had to talk to Lester before, at least not in any position of authority, and he was stumped as to how to make a breakthrough.  The man, once decided on his course of action, was impossible to influence.  No wonder Nick lost his temper with him so often.

It didn’t help, of course, that he was just as tired as Nick had been, thereby impairing his ability to employ anything like logical reasoning.  The only reason he was still trying was out of some – probably misguided – attempt at redemption.  Which was ridiculous since the person he was trying to redeem himself with had left hours ago.

“Go home, Hart,” said Lester suddenly, and with unusual perceptiveness.  “Follow your own advice and get some sleep.  I need you and Professor Cutter alert and awake tomorrow, so you can start working on that analysis.”

Stephen refrained from pointing out that Nick probably wouldn’t want him helping with the analysis.  He very much doubted that Lester would see their personal issues as an excuse for not getting the job in hand done.

Nonetheless, he had followed Lester’s instruction and left, sensing that he wasn’t going to get any further now, and also nursing the uncomfortable feeling that Lester might actually be right – they _wouldn’t_ get much further without establishing some kind of pattern for the anomaly’s time-shifts.  Whether there was a pattern, and whether Nick would be able to find it, was another matter entirely.

But right now Stephen was just grateful for the opportunity to get some sleep.  He had followed Nick’s lead and taken a cab home, leaving the truck outside the Home Office.  Trying to drive in his current state would have been suicidal and, as bad as things were, Stephen didn’t think he was _quite_ at that point yet.

However, as with all nights when a person is so tired they’ve almost forgotten what it is to not be tired, Stephen found sleep hard to come by.  His head – and his heart – wouldn’t allow it.

Seeing Helen again so soon after her little revelation had rattled him more than he liked to admit.  He had known it was senseless, and out of all proportion to the situation, to point a gun at her, but he had been startled, and once the gun was raised it had acted like a barrier between them, preventing Helen from getting close.

Which was exactly what Stephen wanted.  He didn’t want to give her any more opportunities to try and manipulate him.  Not that he would allow himself to be manipulated any more, but it was better if she never got the chance to try.

Basically, Stephen wanted Helen Cutter to stay as far away from him – and Nick – as was humanly possible.  And since the realms of human possibility had recently expanded to encompass a large chunk of prehistory, Stephen decided he would be perfectly happy if she went off to the Permian and never came back again.

Because, despite her usefulness in confirming that the predator babies had survived, her ‘coincidental’ appearance in the Permian at the same time as them had only served to remind Nick of everything that he didn’t want to be reminded of.  Stephen had seen it in his eyes when he refused the offer of a lift.  And while he knew that it was going to take a lot more time, and a lot more effort to repair their broken relationship, those efforts were not going to be aided by Helen’s continued reappearances.

Stephen was only just beginning to suspect just how important Nick was to him.  He had known that Nick was the most important person in his life, but that importance was now being measured directly against what it felt like when that person was missing.  And the sensation wasn’t a pleasant one.

He would settle for the resumption of their old friendship.  Indeed, that was the most he had the right to expect, or to hope for.  And he probably wouldn’t even get that.  Earning Nick’s forgiveness was going to be possibly the hardest thing he had ever done, never mind getting anything more than that.  Stephen strongly suspected that the ‘time heals all wounds’ cliché was just that – a cliché.

But even if Nick’s wounds did heal, and he did forgive Stephen, that still didn’t necessarily mean they would regain what they had before.  What he had done could quite easily have caused irreparable damage.  Nick might forgive, but he would never be able to completely forget.

Not for the first time, Stephen wished that Helen Cutter had never come back.


	4. Chapter 4

 

Nick stared across his office at the cabinet of fossils opposite him, drumming a pencil on the desk absentmindedly as he did so.  Part of him could sense that he was spacing out, but the other part of him seemed quite content to do so.  His brain just didn’t want to work any more, and was apparently willing to go on strike rather than be forced to contemplate any more numbers and calculations.

Unlike Stephen, the previous night had seen Nick falling asleep virtually before his head hit the pillow.  He had slept for at least fifteen hours, and as far as he could recall his slumber had been a dreamless one.  He had woken refreshed and rejuvenated, in body if not in spirit, his mind already offering up ideas about possible patterns in the anomaly’s movements that he had been too tired to recognise before.

However, four hours later, surrounded by numerous piles of discarded paper, and with his computer flashing the message ‘no results found’ at him for what seemed like the hundredth time, Nick’s mind was no longer quite so enthusiastic.  In fact, he felt like it had melted, and was trickling out of his ears.

It didn’t help that the first thing he had found upon entering his office at the university was a message from Lester demanding results, or at least theories, about the anomaly as soon as possible.  Lester couldn’t possibly put any more pressure on Nick than Nick was putting on himself, but having the civil servant breathing down his neck certainly wasn’t going to help matters.

And, on top of that, Nick had realised very quickly that he wasn’t going to be able to do this on his own.  After only half-an-hour of staring at sheets of numbers his mind was spinning, and he had come to the conclusion that he needed someone to discuss his ideas with, since he was already unable to tell what was truly constructive from what was complete nonsense.

He needed help.

*   *   *   *   * 

For the second time in less than a week, Stephen found himself standing at the door to one of Nick Cutter’s domains, unsure about the welcome he would receive.

He knew he was very probably just setting himself up for another fall, but he couldn’t seem to keep away.  Lester wasn’t going to do anything further until he had some at least partially solid evidence to go on, and therefore Nick needed to work out some kind of rationale for the anomaly’s behaviour.  And for that he would need help – something that Stephen felt compelled to offer, whatever the consequences.

Once again he contemplated his choices – knock, or enter unannounced? Eventually he concluded that discretion was the better part of valour in this case.  He didn’t want to antagonise Nick any more than was humanly possible.  He knocked on the door.

“Come in,” came the muffled response.

Stephen sighed quietly in relief – Nick probably thought he was a student or something – and walked into the office.

He was halfway to the desk before Nick showed any signs of noticing him.  The other man was gazing vacantly across the room, and Stephen suspected his summons to enter had been more automatic than anything else.

However, as Stephen’s shadow fell across the desk, Nick’s gaze suddenly snapped back into focus, and he fixed Stephen with a glare of surprised irritation.

“Don’t you ever give up?”

Stephen smiled lopsidedly.  “I guess not.  Although I would have thought you’d worked that out by now.”

But Nick’s words clearly hadn’t been an invitation to banter.  Frowning in annoyance, he switched his gaze to his computer screen.

“You just don’t get it, Stephen.  I can’t deal with you at the moment.  There are much more important things at stake than our relationship.  And I don’t need the distraction.  I let you come with me through the anomaly because you were the only one who volunteered, and even I wasn’t stupid enough to attempt that alone.  I needed you to help me then.”

“I think you need me to help you now,” answered Stephen, gesturing to the piles of paper covering every available surface.

“No, I don’t,” said Nick shortly.  “I don’t need your help with this, Stephen.  I need to keep my head clear, and I can’t do that with you around.  Don’t you understand?  I have to bring Claudia back.  It’s my fault she’s gone, and therefore I have to be the one to make it right.  The problems between you and I are so far down my list of priorities right now that they barely even feature on it.”

“Well, you need _someone_ to help you,” said Stephen, trying to ignore the hurt that Nick’s words had caused him, even as he knew they were probably correct.

“I have someone to help me.”

Stephen opened his mouth to ask who that someone was, but was interrupted by a voice calling from the corridor.

“Found it, Professor!”

Then Connor burst into the office, waving a book in front of him.  Stephen could just make out the word ‘Temporal’ emblazoned across its front cover.  He tried hard to cover his disbelief at Nick’s new choice of assistant, but he obviously wasn’t entirely successful, because when he turned back to look Nick again, the man was wearing an expression that clearly said he wasn’t going to justify his decisions to anyone, least of all Stephen.

Connor himself had been brought up short by the unexpected presence of Stephen in Cutter’s office, and was now obviously trying to decide what to next.  But Nick saved him the trouble.

“Thank you, Connor.  Don’t worry, Stephen was just leaving.” 

There was an air of finality in his tone, and Stephen knew it would be useless to argue any further.  He headed towards the door, brushing past the wide-eyed Connor as he did so.  Pausing briefly, he muttered something in Connor’s ear.

“Don’t let him work too hard.”

*   *   *   *   * 

After Stephen had left, Nick resumed his absentminded staring, while Connor settled down in a corner to read his book.  It was entitled _Temporal Quantum Physics_ , and the young man had fetched it from the university library after insisting that it might shed some light on their problem.  Nick highly doubted this claim, but Connor looked as if he really wanted to be useful after having Nick ask for his help, and Nick hadn’t the heart to deny him the opportunity.  And besides, there was a slim chance the book might turn out to be helpful after all.  Nick was getting to the point where he’d try anything.

But for now he was content to let Connor read the book while he gave his brain a little more time off.  Connor had looked as if he wanted to comment on Stephen’s presence, but had wisely kept quiet.  Nick was grateful for that – it allowed him to return to his pointless contemplation of his fossil cabinet.

He hadn’t been lying when he’d told Stephen he was a distraction.  What he _had_ bent the truth about was just how distracting Stephen was.  Nick had made out that Stephen was a mere annoyance that would cause a minor irritation.  He had implied that the issues that lay between them were unimportant – that they didn’t matter so long as Claudia was still lost and the predators were still out there somewhere.

And in the grand scheme of things, those issues _didn’t_ matter.  Claudia and the future-predators _were_ more important.  Rationally, logically, Nick knew that, and that was why he had told Stephen to get lost.

But irrationally, illogically, their personal relationship mattered far more to Nick than anything else.  And that was the other part of the reason why he had sent Stephen away.  Because with Stephen in the same room as him, Nick would be hard pressed to think about anything else.

It had been different when they had been exploring through the anomaly.  Then Nick had his adrenaline and sense of danger and urgency to keep him going.  He had to be on the lookout for clues and threats every single second.  And that was more than enough to keep his mind occupied.

But now, back in his office, with nothing but an increasingly frustrating set of numbers to occupy his thoughts, he was finding it more and more difficult to stop thinking about Stephen.  It was as if the man’s betrayal was a worm eating steadily into his heart and mind, gaining a stronger foothold with every passing hour.

Nick knew he should make some kind of effort to stop thinking about his personal problems and get his brain back on track.  Lester wanted results and, more than that, Claudia was depending on him.  The whole of time might be depending on him.  Although that was a ridiculous claim – as Nick had told Connor when he made it.

However, his brain really didn’t want to return to its calculations and equations.  It seemed perfectly happy to wander, in the meantime letting him stare across the room at the case of fossils that made up the basis of his professional career.

Although…hang on a minute.  Nick’s gaze was no longer absentminded – he was now looking at the fossils as if he’d never seen them before.  Hurriedly, he pushed back his chair and walked over to the cabinet, trying to decide if his eyes were deceiving him, or if he was really seeing what he thought he was seeing.

Nick like to call this case his ‘Cabinet of Curiosities’, after the rooms created by sixteenth and seventeenth century collectors.  These rooms would be full of a mixture of the scientific, the artistic, and the ethnographic.  Some of the objects would be familiar, some unfamiliar, some possibly even unexplained.  Often there would be fakes – mock-ups of mythical creatures designed to intrigue and enthral.

Nick’s own cabinet was devoted purely to the scientific.  And while none of his specimens were fake, or unfamiliar to him, many of them _were_ unexplained.  At least, they were unexplained in the sense that he had no idea how they’d ended up where he’d found them.

Like the _Sarcopterygian_ he had shown Connor the first time they’d ever met, the geological locations of the fossils in his cabinet were a mystery to him.  None of them had been found where a palaeontologist such as himself would expect them to be.  They were either geographically or temporally dislocated from the rest of the fossil record.  With hindsight, Nick could now deduce that these dislocations were due to the anomalies, but at the time he had viewed them as a difficult, but potentially thrilling, problem to be solved.

But now there _was_ something unfamiliar in the cabinet.  A single fossilised bone, unremarkable to look upon, sat at the front of the middle shelf.  It was this that had caught Nick’s eye.  Because, while the bone might be unremarkable in and of itself, Nick was sure he had never seen it before.  And when he looked closer, he found that he didn’t recognise it at all.  In fact, he was sure that no palaeontologist would recognise it.  It didn’t look like anything else in the fossil record.

Slowly, Nick reached out and unlocked the cabinet.  His hand hovered over the bone for few seconds, as if he was afraid it would vanish if he tried to touch it.  Then reason overcame superstition and he picked it up, turning it over and over in his hands, trying to persuade himself that he had been mistaken, that it was a perfectly normal fossil that he’d just forgotten he had.

But it wasn’t.  It was something new.  Something he couldn’t identify.

“Professor?  Are you alright?”

Nick was unable to prevent a slight start at the sound of Connor’s voice at his shoulder.  He almost dropped the strange bone, fumbling with it for a few seconds before it settled firmly in his grasp once more.

Connor’s eyes were flicking between Nick’s face and the bone, as if he was trying to decide what Nick was finding so interesting about this one item.  What he saw in Nick’s face must have prompted him to offer an explanation.

“You told me you found that on a dig in the Badlands, over in America,” he said.  “Is that right?”

“I don’t know.  You tell me,” replied Nick, still staring at the fossil.  But when Connor didn’t say anything else, he looked up to find the young man looking at him in confusion.  He realised he needed to elaborate.

“I don’t recognise this,” he explained, holding out the bone so Connor could see it more clearly.  “This didn’t used to be in this cabinet.  It’s only appeared since the anomalies started destabilising.  I don’t even recognise the species.”

Connor reached out tentatively and lifted the fossil from Nick’s hand, looking at it closely for a few seconds.  “We could run a search programme on it,” he suggested slowly.  “Input data about it, see if that matches any known species.”

“But we don’t have any data about it,” said Nick.  “It’s a total mystery.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure about that, Professor,” replied Connor, nodding his head in the direction of the cabinet.

Nick turned, and spotted at once what Connor had meant.  A small label was lying on the shelf where the fossil had been.  He had missed it before because it had slid underneath the bone.

Picking it up, he read the notes that were inscribed on it in his own hand…

_‘Location: Badlands, Montana.  Strata: Late Cretaceous.  Skeleton: mostly disintegrated due to erosion – although remaining bone fragments indicate two individuals.  Note: Bone density and structure indicates mammalian.’_

He looked at Connor in surprise.  “Mammalian?  But this is much too large to belong to any of the mammals that were around in the Cretaceous, even this close to the extinction boundary.”

Connor shrugged.  “I guess that’s why it’s in your cabinet, Professor.”  He moved back over to where he had been sitting and extracted his laptop from his bag.  “We can input the information we have about the bone into my database and see if it matches anything.  Although, given what you’ve already deduced about it, that seems unlikely.”

Nick thought about pointing out that, as far he was concerned, _he_ hadn’t deduced anything about the bone.  But knowing Connor, that would just lead him into some pointless yet geeky discussion about paradoxes and the nature of perception, full of references to _Doctor Who_ and other shows Nick had never seen.  So he kept quiet while Connor booted up his database, trying to put together in his mind a coherent list of statistics about the fossil that the computer programme would accept.

“Ready, Professor.”

“Okay, so we know the fossil came from Montana.  And we know that it was found in late Cretaceous rock strata – say 70 million years old as a ballpark figure.  Dimension-wise, it’s…” Nick fetched a tape measure from his desk and took some rough measurements.  “It’s 28.1cm long, with a central diameter of approximately 2.3cm.  Which means the circumference is about…”

“7.23cm,” supplied Connor.  “I have a calculator on my laptop,” he explained, when Nick looked surprised.

“So, based on that small amount of data, what do we get?”

Connor tapped the keys for a few more seconds, and then there was a whirring sound as the computer processed the search request.

“We get nothing.  Nothing in my database matches the animal that this bone came from.”

“Are you sure?” asked Nick.  “There are other variables we didn’t input.  For example, we don’t know if this bone comes from an adult or a juvenile.  Maybe that would make a difference.”

“It might,” said Connor slowly.  “Except for one factor.  There’s a field in the search form for ‘other information’.  I told the computer that the bone was ‘probably mammalian’.  That sealed the deal.  Your assertion was correct, Professor.  There are no mammals indigenous to the Cretaceous that grow this big.  Of course, we don’t know everything about prehistoric evolution – this might be a new species that we simply haven’t seen yet in the fossil record.  But if that’s the case, then the computer can’t identify it.  The database is stumped.”

“I think it is a new species,” mused Nick, thinking aloud.  “And the reason we haven’t seen it before in the fossil record is because it shouldn’t be there to be seen.”  A possibility was presenting itself, and although Nick didn’t really want to entertain it, he was becoming surer with every passing second that this possibility was actually a distinct _probability_ , if not a certainty.

“I think this bone came from the skeleton of one of the future-predators,” he informed Connor.  “Helen said that they were ‘rampaging through time at will’.  That means one of them could quite easily have ended up dying in the Cretaceous, and therefore its skeleton would have ended up in that strata.”

“But Professor, that looks like a leg bone,” Connor said.  “Maybe a femur.  But it’s way too small to have come from the adult predators we saw.”

“No, this must be from one of the offspring,” Nick agreed.  “It must have died in the Cretaceous sometime after we left it in the Permian, but before reaching full adulthood.”

“Er, Professor…”

“Yes?  What?”

“Well, it’s just the label says that there were the remains of two individuals at the Badlands site.  If these are the remains of the predators you left in the Permian, then what exactly has been rampaging through time, like Helen said?  They probably died quite young.  Which doesn’t leave time for much rampaging.”

It took a couple of seconds for the full import of Connor’s words to sink in.  Then…

“Oh my god,” whispered Nick in horror.  “Other predators have found the anomalies.  It’s not just the offspring we left behind.  There could be hundreds of them slipping through, destabilising the anomalies and affecting the past.”

Then something else nudged at his thoughts.

“And she knew.  And she didn’t tell us.  She might not have been able to find the future-anomaly in the Permian, but Helen knew that more predators had come through it, and had gone on to other prehistoric periods.  She must have encountered them.  That’s what she meant when she said the rampaging predators were having an effect on the anomalies – of course that couldn’t be the result of only two creatures.  They wouldn’t have enough of an influence on their own.  But if a significant enough number of the population learned how to use the anomalies…”

He trailed off, unable to quite believe the extent of Helen’s deception.  He had told her that he didn’t know what she was capable of any more, but even so, he hadn’t believed her capable of _this_.  She had known that there were more predators out there, and deliberately hadn’t told them.  What on earth could she hope to gain from such an action?

“She’s still hoping to find the future-anomaly,” he muttered aloud.  “She knew that if we knew about the influx of predators into the past, we’d make it a priority to find the anomaly they were using, and try and shut it down, or at the very least guard it against more incursions.  And she didn’t want that to happen. She’s still hoping that she can somehow find it and use it.  But she couldn’t do that if we knew about it and were actively working to get rid of it.  She would rather let vicious, intelligent predators distort the entirety of prehistory than give up her chance at the prize.”

“Cutter…” began Connor, looking worried.

“We need to stop her,” announced Nick suddenly.  “This is bigger now than just bringing Claudia back.  We need to do exactly what Helen was trying to prevent us doing.  We need to find the future-anomaly in the Permian, and we need to stop the predators coming through somehow.  That has to be our priority now.”

“But we still can’t predict when the anomaly will take us to the right part of the Permian,” said Connor tentatively.

“In that case, we need to find out how to predict it,” asserted Nick.  He suddenly felt re-energised.  “We can still look for the same part of the Permian we were searching for before.  Only now we can kill two birds with one stone – we can eliminate the original offspring _and_ locate the future-anomaly.”

He rifled through the piles of paper on his desk, locating a clean sheet and hastily drawing a rough timeline on it.

“Let’s start from scratch.  I need to plot exactly where each trip through the anomaly took us on this timeline.”  He located another piece of paper and handed it to Connor.  “This is a list of our destinations – read them out to me, would you?  I know the first one was the Carboniferous…”

After five minutes of recitation from Connor and scribbling from Nick they had covered the first twenty-four hours worth of journeys, and one end of Nick’s timeline was littered with little numbers.  The other end, however, still remained blank.

“From here on in we started going though the anomaly every half-hour,” Nick muttered, making a note on the timeline.  “And we started encountering time periods later than the Permian.”  He finished filling in the timeline, with Connor’s assistance, and then laid it flat on the desk, surveying it thoughtfully.  Then he snapped his fingers, making Connor jump.  “And that’s why we didn’t encounter those time periods earlier!” he said.  “Because we weren’t going through every thirty minutes.  I was so busy trying to make the whole thing complicated that I’d completely forgotten the fact that it might be simple!”

Grabbing his pencil again, he started joining up the numbers on the timeline, working backwards and bouncing from one to the next in long arcs across the paper.  When he had got as far back as the twenty-four hour change he stopped and contemplated his handiwork.

“I was right – there is a pattern!” he exclaimed.  “And it seems to be centring around the extinction event at the end of the Permian.”  He showed the timeline to Connor.  “Look – it’s like the ripples on a pond when you throw a stone in.  The ripples are closer together near the centre, but get further apart further out.  And the anomaly’s destinations are the same – more around the centre-point and less the further away in time you get.  Except that it’s not following a logical pattern by simply starting in the centre and working its way out.  A complete set of results would show the full ripple effect, but you can’t see it when you’re actually experiencing it.  But now I know this, I should be able to extrapolate where our missing trips would have taken us.”  Nick scribbled on the timeline again, while Connor watched uncertainly.

“There!  You see?  Our first trip took us to the beginning of the Carboniferous – that seems to be the start of the cycle.  Apparently we got a lucky break there.  Then the next one – if we’d made it – would have taken us to the very early Triassic.  Then the late Permian, right before the extinction, then on to the late Eocene.  And so on, and so on.”  He looked at Connor excitedly.  “Now we can work out when the anomaly will cycle back to the right part of the Permian.”

But Connor still looked a little doubtful.  “Why do you think the pattern centres on the Permian extinction?” he asked.  He felt like someone should play Devil’s Advocate, and since Stephen wasn’t here, that job seemed to have fallen to him.

“Who knows?” replied Nick.  “Maybe that’s where the first anomaly appeared.  Maybe the extinction event had something to do with the anomalies’ origin.  We may never know.”

Connor thought that Helen probably knew, but he refrained from voicing that particular opinion.  Instead he pointed something else out.  “There are still gaps on the timeline – and we don’t know how many more times the anomaly will have to shift to fill those gaps.”

“We can check on that by going back through the anomaly again,” said Nick dismissively.  He did some quick mental calculations.  “It’s been roughly twenty-two hours since we last saw the anomaly shift, to the Permian.  Therefore, if we go back through and end up somewhere Stephen and I have already been, we can work out how many of the shifts in those twenty-two hours were needed to complete a full cycle, and plot the results accordingly.  From there we can work out how much longer we have to wait before the anomaly moves back to the right part of the Permian.”

Cutter sounded so convincing that Connor really wanted to give in and be convinced.  But he felt that someone had to be the voice of painful logic in the conversation.  “One more thing, Professor.”  He gestured at the timeline.  “If we assume that to be correct, it looks like the anomaly already made all its visits to the Permian while you and Stephen were going through it.  Therefore you should already have been at the right point at least once.”

For a second Nick just stared at the timeline.  “I expect we just missed it without realising it,” he said, hoping that he was right.  “One trip was starting to blur into another, after all.  But now we should be able to predict almost _exactly_ when to go through to hit the right point.”

“I’m glad to hear it, Professor.”

Both Nick and Connor jumped slightly, before looking round to see Lester framed in the office doorway.  The civil servant looked completely unapologetic at having startled them, and was surveying Nick’s office with something like disgust on his face.  Nick smiled inwardly, thinking that Lester had probably never seen such a messy office, let alone worked in one.

“You didn’t have to come all the way down here to check up on us,” he said, a thin veneer of sarcasm colouring the words.  “Although we are very touched by your effort.”

Lester’s expression now showed exactly what he thought of Nick’s attempt at humour.  “Well, since you’ve been completely _incommunicado_ for the whole morning, I had no choice to come to your…office, and get a progress report myself.”

Nick’s eyes darted to his phone, which he had purposely left off the hook so Lester _couldn’t_ bother him with demands for updates.  He had turned his mobile off for a similar reason.

Lester’s eyes followed Nick’s.  “I see.  Well, in any case, am I to understand from your previous discussion that you’ve made a breakthrough?”

“Yes,” replied Nick shortly.  He didn’t relish the thought of explaining himself all over again to Lester, particularly since he suspected that even Connor had been having trouble keeping up with him over the last half-an-hour.

However, Lester didn’t appear to want an explanation.  “As I said, I’m happy to hear it.  I’m assigning you a fresh team of military operatives, under the command of Captain Jacobs.  Their orders are to proceed through the anomaly and eliminate the predator threat, once and for all.”

Apparently some explanations were going to be necessary, after all.  Nick quickly outlined what he’d deduced about the influx of future-predators into the past, and about how they needed to find the future-anomaly in the Permian to prevent that influx ever happening.  He tried to ignore the glint in Lester’s eye as he acknowledged that, once again, Helen had deceived them all.

“And once you find this future-anomaly?”

“I don’t know,” replied Nick.  “But we have to stop the predators coming through it somehow.”

Lester sighed exasperatedly.  “I can see where this is leading.  Alright – I’ll assign a larger detachment of soldiers.  That should be enough to at least guard the anomaly when you find it – until you can come up with a better solution, Professor.”


	5. Chapter 5

 

It was 11:45am, and activity at the anomaly site in the Forest of Dean was a maelstrom of suppressed panic.  The time that Nick had calculated for the anomaly-shift to the right part of the Permian was fast approaching, and scientists and Special Forces alike were busy with last-minute preparations, determined that they would be ready for any eventuality once they stepped through the anomaly.

Having finally established a probable pattern for the anomaly’s movements, Nick and Connor had immediately hot-footed it back to the Forest of Dean, Connor enthusiastically calling Abby, and Nick (rather less enthusiastically) calling Stephen to arrange that they would meet at the anomaly site.

Thanks to good traffic and the deliberate ignorance of a few speed limits, they had made the trip in less than three hours, with Stephen and Abby turning up half-an-hour later, followed by the Special Forces team fairly shortly after that.

Nick had immediately made preparations to go through the anomaly, only reluctantly conceding that he would once again have to take Stephen with him, as the only other person qualified to confirm whether they had ended up somewhere they had already been.  They left the Special Forces soldiers hurriedly preparing themselves, needing to be ready as soon as possible in case Nick and Stephen should return with the news that they were close to the right time window.

However, as it turned out they were too late.  The period they emerged in was the Carboniferous, and not the Permian, and yet both Nick and Stephen could tell at a glance that it was somewhere they previously been, partly due to the evolutionary progress of the flora and fauna, and partly due to the presence of a boot print exactly matching Stephen’s footwear right next to the anomaly.

Nick had hurriedly consulted his makeshift timeline, and unfortunately concluded that they were at a stage in the shift-pattern that put them beyond the right time to find the correct point in the Permian.  And it would be over thirty-six hours until the cycle reached the right point again.

So they had had no choice but to wait.  The soldiers had stood down, and the whole lot of them had decamped to a nearby hotel to pass the next night, day, and another night in restless anticipation.

Nick had found the waiting almost unbearable, partly because he felt like any delay was giving the predator-offspring more of a chance to slip away from him.  Which was ridiculous – the complexities of time-travel meant that as long as they eventually found the right part of the Permian, it wouldn’t matter how long it took them to find it.  But every hour that passed without him bringing Claudia back chaffed at him, and made his guilt weigh even more heavily on his shoulders.

But that wasn’t the main reason for his restlessness.  Being stuck in this hotel meant being stuck near Stephen, with nothing to distract either of them from the problems that still hung between them.

To his credit, Stephen had taken his last conversation with Nick to heart, and hadn’t come anywhere near him during the hours of waiting, choosing instead to divide his time between his room and the hotel bar.  He made a very lonely figure, sat in a corner nursing a drink.  Abby was still shunning him, and Connor was wary of getting in the middle of a situation he couldn’t handle.  And the Special Forces soldiers were keeping very much to themselves, not really conversing with anyone else, except to ask the occasional question of Nick about what they could expect on the other side of the anomaly.

All of which left Stephen well out in the cold, a situation that was making Nick uncomfortably aware of the fact that normally he and Stephen would have passed the time making plans, testing theories, and possibly even getting drunk.

His only alternatives were Abby and Connor.  However, while Abby had a sensible head on her shoulders, and while Connor had proved himself more helpful than Nick would have previously anticipated, neither of them really qualified as a suitable substitute for Stephen.  But they were all he had, and so he had spent several hours with both of them, getting Connor to help him with a final confirmation of their calculations, and instructing Abby on what to do if they shouldn’t return from their expedition.

After that there wasn’t much more any of them could do except wait, and contemplate what it was they were about to undertake.

Late the evening before they were finally due to make the crucial trip through the anomaly, Nick was in his room, looking over his notes one final time – although by now he had read them so many times he practically knew them by heart.

In conference with Connor, he had finally established exactly which point in the shift-cycle should take them through to the right part of the Permian to intercept the predator babies.  Then he hoped it would be a simple matter of finding them and eliminating them.  The more difficult part would be to find the future-anomaly, and then do something about it.  What that something would be, Nick still didn’t know.  He only knew they had to find some way of shutting it down, or at the very least preventing the predators from coming through it.

The sudden banging on the door almost made him drop his papers on the floor.  The knocking was so vehement that Nick wondered if Stephen had finally cracked and was coming to have it out with him once and for all.  But then he heard a muffled voice through the wood, one that he recognised as Connor’s.

“Professor?  Professor Cutter?  Are you there?  I really need to talk to you.”

Nick sighed and got up to open the door.  He really needed to get some sleep – they all did – and the tone of Connor’s voice suggested that he was about to be privy to some outlandish theory that he really didn’t want to hear at this time of night.

“Yes, Connor, what is it?”

Connor pushed past him into the room without waiting for an invitation – something which in itself was surprising, as normally he would have been far too intimidated by Cutter to be so bold.  Nick wondered uneasily if bringing Connor into his confidence over the past couple of days had boosted the young man’s ego a little _too_ much.

But then he saw the expression on Connor’s face.  He looked excited, but he also looked extremely worried, and Nick suddenly felt like he should be taking Connor seriously, after all.

“I’ve thought of something, Professor,” said Connor, without preamble.  “We’ve established at what point you need to step through the anomaly to find the predator babies in the Permian, yes?”

Nick nodded, wondering where this was going.

“Well, if the anomaly is following a cycle that takes it back to all the points in time that it’s led to before, then the only point in time where you’re going to find the offspring at a sufficiently early stage in their development is the point where you first took them back to the Permian.”

Nick felt his heart plummet, although he couldn’t say exactly why.

“I can’t believe we didn’t see this before.  If you wait for the next shift to the Permian after that, you’ll be too late.  The very first time you went through the anomaly, you said that the bones you found had been there for a significant period of time – long enough for the predators to have grown up?”

Nick considered for a moment, then nodded again.  “Definitely.  I’m not an expert in bones that aren’t fossilised, but I’d say that the skeleton had been there for a number of years.  The deterioration of the campsite also confirms that.  The only reason the food hadn’t decayed was because it was in an airtight container.  And Helen’s camera had been buried, which protected the film in it from the elements.”

“So even if the predators had only reached adolescence, in our terms, they’d still be capable of going through the anomaly and killing a child?”

“It’s likely.  We don’t know anything about the creature’s life-cycle, but its mammalian heritage suggests that it would become dangerous within a very short space of time.”

“So I was right – the time you’ve picked to go through the anomaly will have to take you to the same part of the Permian as you took the babies to the first time.”

“Yes, I suppose it will.  I still can’t quite see what you’re getting at, Connor.”

“Only this.  If you have to go to that precise point in time, you’re extremely likely to run into yourselves bringing the offspring through.  In fact, that would be the best way to find the babies, because you’ll know exactly where they are.”

Connor paused, taking in the faintly incredulous look on Nick’s face.

“Look, Professor, I know you still see me as some kind of nerdy geek, and that this sounds like something out of _Star Trek_.  But this is real, Professor.  We’re living in Science-Fiction now, and what I’m telling you is that this could be a very real danger.  If your past selves even see you, it could change the whole timeline.  Again.  And I very much doubt we’ll be able to sort anything out from _that_ mess.”

“But you’ve just said that this could be the best way to find the offspring,” said Nick.  “And besides, if we’ve come through the anomaly from _now_ , surely the anomaly should lead back _here_.  How will our previous selves be able to come through if the anomaly isn’t leading from their time?”

“I don’t know,” replied Connor stubbornly.  “I only know that they have to be there, with the offspring.  Otherwise the events that spawned this timeline wouldn’t have happened and we wouldn’t be here having this conversation.”

So what do we do?”

“You’ll have to wait until the original events have played out exactly as they’re supposed to.  Hide from your past selves, and wait until you and Helen have gone back though the anomaly.  Then you can catch the babies.”

So now, just before noon the next day, Nick, Stephen, and a party of Special Forces soldiers were making final preparations to step through the anomaly to what would hopefully be the right time and place to find the predators.

Nick hadn’t really wanted to bring Stephen along this time.  He hadn’t thought the man would be needed, what with all the military-types that were wandering around.  But Captain Jacobs had overruled him – apparently Lester’s generosity hadn’t stretched as far as Jacobs would have liked, and the soldier was insisting on taking everyone who knew how to handle a firearm.

And that meant Stephen was coming whether Nick liked it or not.  Bringing the total number of people in the party to eight.  Which Nick supposed was a little on the scanty side, considering Lester wanted some of the detachment of soldiers to guard the future-anomaly in the Permian until they could figure out a way to make it close.

It didn’t help that Jacobs was also insisting that two of his men remain behind in the Forest of Dean, to watch for any sign of trouble at that end.  That was the main reason he had wanted Stephen to come along to provide an extra shooter.

“Professor!”

It was Connor, who was coming towards him waving a watch.

“You’ve got two minutes, Professor.”

Jacobs heard him and immediately began shepherding his men and the final pieces of their gear towards the anomaly.  Stephen had already taken up position beside the flickering shards of light, looking vaguely uncomfortable, but also confident at the same time.

“Thank you, Connor,” replied Nick.  He smiled, although it was half-hearted at best, and Connor smiled back equally tentatively.

“Keep an eye on the anomaly, okay?” said Nick quietly.  “And Abby,” he added, glancing over at the young woman, whose gaze was flicking between himself, Connor, and Stephen.

“Will do, Professor,” said Connor brightly.  Then he turned serious.  “Take care of yourself.  And come back safe.  _All_ of you,” he finished pointedly, his eyes darting momentarily to the figure standing beside the anomaly.  Then he turned and walked away towards Abby.

Nick’s eyebrows rose in surprise.  Since when had Connor taken it upon himself to lecture him about his personal life?  He shook his head, chuckling ruefully.  That boy was definitely getting too big for his boots.

“Captain Jacobs, are you and your men ready?  It’s time we were going.”

*   *   *   *   * 

Well, at least the first step had gone without a hitch.  They had at least ended up in the Permian, as Nick had predicted.  Now they just needed to figure out if they were at the right point in the Permian.  Nick drew Captain Jacobs to one side.

“We need to go to the location of the campsite, to establish when we are.  Now, it’s entirely possible that it won’t yet exist, because we might have arrived a little before our previous selves.  I need someone to remain on watch here in case that’s true, and warn us if we appear again through the anomaly.  Under no circumstances can the watchers let themselves be seen by our past selves.”

Nick was repeating himself – he had already explained all this to Jacobs earlier that morning.  But he had the sneaking suspicion that the soldier hadn’t quite followed what he was being told.  Nick didn’t blame him – he barely followed it himself.  But Connor had seemed to think it was imperative that they not cross paths with their other selves, and so long as Jacobs understood that, Nick didn’t care if he was having trouble following all the technical stuff.

“I understand, Professor.  The men will remain hidden,” replied Jacobs.  “Anders!” he called, beckoning to one of his men.  “You stay here and watch the anomaly.”  He looked around for a few seconds.  “Keep Hart with you.  He’s the only other one around here with any expertise on the anomalies.  That okay with you, Professor?” he asked, turning back to Nick.

“That’s fine, Captain,” Nick replied, refusing to even glance at Stephen.  For a second he wondered if Jacobs was being tactful, but then quickly dismissed the notion.  It did make sense for Stephen to remain on watch by the anomaly.  And in Nick’s experience most soldiers wouldn’t know tact if it came up and battered them over the head with their own gun.

“The rest of you, move out,” Jacobs ordered sharply.  The remaining five soldiers picked up the gear and moved off in the direction of the campsite.  Jacobs issued a few more instructions to Anders and Stephen, and then he and Nick followed after them.

*   *   *   *   * 

Stephen flattened himself on the ground next to Anders, the soldier having chosen a good vantage point from which to view the anomaly – on some high ground, but screened by a clump of bushes and scrub.  And, more importantly, it was away from the route the group with the predator babies would have to take when they came through the anomaly.

Stephen still found it difficult to believe that previous versions of Nick, Helen, Ryan, and the others were going to appear out of the past into _his_ present.  He supposed, given the existence of the anomalies, he should be less surprised by this development, but it was different when it was people, and people he knew at that.  The whole thing sounded far too much like something out of one of those Sci-Fi shows Connor watched.

But Connor had convinced Nick, and Nick had convinced everybody else.  It came down to what Stephen had said previously about Nick being the type of person who made people follow him.  Coming from him, even an outlandish theory about crossing your own timeline sounded plausible.

And yet, Stephen still couldn’t quite believe that this theory was going to bear fruit.  But he supposed it didn’t matter.  It was a good idea to have someone watching the anomaly, even if nothing happened.  He and Anders would probably just lie here until the others came back after having completed their task, and then they would all go back through the anomaly together…

“Hart!”

Anders’ whisper was quiet, but penetrating, jolting Stephen out of his train of thought immediately.

“What is it?” he whispered back.

Anders jerked his head in the direction of the anomaly.  Stephen’s gaze followed the gesture.

At first he couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary.  Then…wait, was the anomaly getting smaller?  Yes, it was definitely getting smaller.  And then, as he watched, it gave one final twinkle and winked out of existence.

“Shit.”

He had known this was bound to happen, sooner or later.  He and Nick had been incredibly lucky not to get stuck in any of the places they had visited over the past few days.  But why now, just when they’d thought everything was finally going to plan?  This was the last thing they needed.

Stephen was reaching for his radio, about to report what had happened to Jacobs, when another hiss from Anders stopped him.  He flicked his gaze back to the anomaly site, and his eyes widened in disbelief.

The anomaly was back, as if it had never been away.  It couldn’t have been more than twenty seconds since it had vanished, and now it was back.  What was going on here?

They watched the anomaly for another five minutes, but it didn’t show any more signs of erratic behaviour.  It was as if it had had its little joke at their expense, and was now going to pretend that nothing had happened.

But then, as Anders was reaching for his own radio to report in to Jacobs, it was Stephen’s turn to stop _him_ , gesturing frantically in the direction of the anomaly.

People were coming through.  First the soldiers, one of whom was Ryan, carrying a supply chest, and the crate containing the offspring.  Then, after a short interval, Nick and Helen, the former looking happy about something, while the latter looked faintly annoyed – although Stephen couldn’t quite seem to remember what had happened to provoke those reactions before they stepped through the anomaly.

It was weird, seeing Nick and Ryan under these circumstances.  A man who he knew was already somewhere in the Permian, and a man who he knew to be dead.  And yet here they were, right in front of him, walking into the prehistoric from a point in his past.

“Jacobs, come in.  Over.”  Anders was talking quietly into his radio, his eyes fixed on the party moving away from the anomaly.

“Jacobs here.  What have you got, Anders? Over.”

“Incoming.  Professor Cutter, his wife, Captain Ryan, Robertson, Eppes, Harrison and Tyler have all just come through the anomaly.  They’re headed in your direction.  Over.”

“Understood.  We’re keeping out of sight.  You and Hart follow on behind.  We’re behind the ridge on the east side of the campsite.  Circle around to the south and you shouldn’t be seen.  Over.”

“Got it.  ETA fifteen minutes.  Anders out.”

*   *   *   *   * 

Fourteen of the predicted fifteen minutes later, Stephen crouched down beside Nick, who was lying on the top of the ridge behind some boulders, peering down at the campsite.

The group with the offspring had arrived five minutes previously, and were already busy setting up their equipment.  Nick was watching them with something like wonder etched across his features.  He didn’t turn his head as Stephen moved up beside him, but instead whispered hoarsely.

“You know, I didn’t quite believe Connor when he told me this might happen.  But there I am, clear as you like.  This is fantastic.”

Stephen, for his part, was finding it extremely weird to have two Nick Cutters in his field of vision, and it was sending him a little cross-eyed.  But all the same, he couldn’t help but think about the fact that the Nick at the bottom of the hill knew nothing about his betrayal, while the one at the top was likely to start giving him the cold shoulder again at any second.

“Professor Cutter.”

It was Jacobs, who settled himself on Nick’s other side, glancing momentarily down at the campsite before fixing his attention on Nick.

“What do we do now, Professor?”

“We wait,” said Nick firmly.  “Events have to play out as they did before – we can’t affect this part of the timeline.  The predator will come from the west – the direction of the anomaly.  Captain Ryan and Helen will both be on the ridgeline to the north.  And that’s where the Gorgonopsid will come from, as well.  So long as we stay here and don’t show ourselves, none of the people down there will have the slightest clue we’re here.”

Jacobs looked like he was struggling to maintain his detached military persona.  “But if we let things play out as before, a lot of good men, including my senior officer, are going to die down there.”

Nick looked pained.  “I know, Captain,” he replied.  “But there’s nothing we can do about that.  If we change something big enough, the whole of the timeline leading from that moment could be irrevocably altered, with who knows what consequences.  We’ve already caused enough damage.”

“But you want to catch and kill the predator’s offspring,” argued Jacobs.  “Won’t that change the timeline?  By doing that, won’t you change everything _we’ve_ been doing up to this point?”

“I don’t know,” admitted Nick.  “I don’t know what’s going to happen when we eliminate the babies.  But we have to do it nonetheless.  The predators were never supposed to be here in the first place.  Any changes caused by their presence here were _not_ supposed to happen.  Therefore, by removing the babies, we should be restoring the original timeline, not creating another new one.”

Jacobs looked as if he wanted to argue the point some more, but Nick forestalled him.  “Are we going to have a problem here?” he asked quietly.  “I know it’s hard, but this is the way it has to be.”

There was a pause, and then Jacobs nodded once, before moving back to join the rest of his men, no doubt to apprise them of the painful necessities of the situation.

Stephen remained where he was.  “He’s got a point, though,” he said cautiously, not sure if Nick was going to listen to him.  “We _don’t_ know what will happen once we kill the offspring.  I’m not the time paradox expert that Connor seems to be, but if we kill them, doesn’t that mean the original timeline _won’t_ have been affected, Claudia will never have vanished, and therefore we won’t have had to do any of the things to bring us to this point?  Won’t this timeline just cease to exist?”

“I don’t know,” said Nick again.  “It’s quite possible that might happen.  But even if it does, I can’t regret it.  We’ll have brought Claudia back, and disposed of the babies.  That can only be a good thing.”

“But we need to find the future-anomaly as well,” Stephen pointed out.  “If we wipe out this timeline, we won’t know that it’s still open, and that more predators are coming through from the future.  And I thought that was our priority?”

“I know all this, Stephen!” replied Nick irritably.  “We’re in a vicious circle here.  There’s no point in getting rid of the babies if we’re then not around to find the future-anomaly.  But there’s no point in finding the anomaly if we’re leaving the offspring to grow up and potentially still attack Claudia.”

“So what do we do?”

“We hope that it’ll turn out okay.”

*   *   *   *   * 

Connor and Abby sat and stared at the spot where, fifteen minutes previously, the anomaly had been hovering.  Now it was just an empty space framed by woodland, but neither of them could seem to tear their eyes away.

“Do you think it’ll come back?” Abby whispered, the first time either of them had spoken.

“Of course it will.”  Connor’s voice sounded confident, but Abby thought she could detect a faint undercurrent of doubt.

She smiled.  It was nice of Connor to try and reassure her, even if he wasn’t sure himself.

“What do you think is happening on the other side?” she asked, seeking further reassurance.

Connor checked his watch.  “Well, by now they’ve probably made it to the campsite, and if my theory is correct, they’re hiding from their past selves, waiting for an opportunity to get to the offspring.”

“It must be so weird, seeing yourself like that,” Abby muttered.

“Just so long as they don’t let themselves be seen,” said Connor worriedly.  “There’s the potential for far too many things to go wrong as it is.”

Abby looked at him sharply.  “What things?  Apart from the fact that they could get trapped in the past or killed by predators from the future, that is.”

  1. Everyone has theories, including the writers of _Star Trek_ , but nobody really _knows_.  And that includes me.”



“Connor, you’re doing the best you can,” said Abby softly.  “If no one knows what’s going to happen, then all we can do is hope for the best.  If you say the anomaly is going to come back, then I believe you.”

“Thanks.”  Connor smiled at her.  “That means a lot, coming from you.”

Abby grinned back.  “Well, just don’t go getting any ideas,” she said, punching him playfully on the arm.  “I’m swearing off men for a while.  I think we’ve firmly established that I always pick the wrong ones.  And I wouldn’t want you to be a ‘wrong one’.”

Connor mock-grimaced, rubbing his arm exaggeratedly.  “No ideas here,” he protested.  “Never had an idea in my life.”

He turned his eyes back to the vacant anomaly site, Abby following suit, and both of them hoped for the best.

*   *   *   *   * 

Nick watched the scene unfolding below him.  He watched as the soldiers finished efficiently setting up the camp, Captain Ryan in charge, but also pitching in like everyone else.  He watched himself talking to the Captain, finalising the details of their mission.  He watched Helen call him over and ask him to take some pictures of her.  And he watched the realisation as it dawned on his face, as he worked out that they were creating their own past.

He knew what came next, and he tore his eyes away from the scene for just a second to glance at Captain Jacobs and his men.  There had been some muttering amongst the soldiers when Jacobs told them they had to let events progress as they had before.  In fact, there had been more than just muttering – Nick had caught one or two of the protests that the soldiers had made, by necessity in quiet voices, but no less vehement for that.  It was clear that, like Jacobs, the rest of the men were not happy with the situation, and Nick just hoped he could trust them to do what they had to.

By the time he directed his gaze back down the hill, his other self had run back to Ryan and was telling him what was going on.  Then he watched as Helen tried once again to insinuate herself back into his life, attempting kiss him, and him pushing her away.

He felt rather than saw Stephen tense beside him.  The man hadn’t moved from his spot next to Nick since he had arrived, and he had seemed just as transfixed by the scene below as Nick was.  But now he was clearly uncomfortable, and Nick had to resist the wry, and slightly mocking, smile that wanted to form on his lips.  This wasn’t the right time for another altercation with Stephen.

“This is it,” Nick heard Jacobs mutter quietly to his men.

And although he knew – they all knew – what was going to happen, it was still a shock when the predator attacked, seemingly from nowhere, taking out Ryan’s team with the minimum of effort.  It was over so quickly.  Robertson, Eppes, Harrison and Tyler – dead before they could react.  Nick once again found himself wondering how such an awesome predator had evolved.  What had precipitated its development?  Why had it needed to become such an efficient killer?

But there was no time to consider these questions.  The predator was now crouched over the crate that held its babies.  It ripped the lid off and extracted its offspring, its movements now almost tender, and Nick was struck by the difference in its behaviour from only a moment before.

But now Ryan was running towards it, and suddenly Nick couldn’t watch any more.  He hadn’t got to know Ryan all that well, but he had already seen the man killed once, and he had buried his body.  He couldn’t watch again.

Closing his eyes, Nick listened as Ryan fired once, twice at the predator.  He heard the predator’s shriek of pain, and knew what came next.  He resisted the urge to put his hands over his ears.

But then there was a third shot.  And a fourth.  And both of them had come from a location much closer than Ryan’s.  There was a yell from Ryan, and another shriek from the predator.  Nick’s eyes snapped open to see what had happened.

Ryan was lying on the floor, but in a different spot to where he should have been.  And as Nick watched he coughed weakly, and then sat up.  He was clearly injured, but not fatally.

Nick’s eyes sought out the predator.  As before it was confronting him, and as before Helen was watching that confrontation from the trees on the northern ridgeline.  Then the Gorgonopsid appeared, charging towards the predator.  Everything was playing out just as before, except Captain Ryan wasn’t dying.  And Nick didn’t want to contemplate what that might mean for them all.

The struggle between the Gorgonopsid and the predator was nearly over.  The predator hadn’t been able to stop the Permian carnivore from eating its offspring, and now it wasn’t going to be able to prevent its own death.  It might be fast and cunning, and have advantages the Gorgonopsid didn’t possess, but the Gorgonopsid was bigger and stronger, and that counted for everything in a battle like this.

And then it was done.  The predator was dead, crushed under the weight of the Gorgonopsid, and Permian native was carrying the body off into the trees, leaving Nick, Helen, and Ryan alone in the quiet aftermath.

Nick fixed his eyes on the crate that had contained the babies.  He wanted to be watching himself and Ryan, to see what would happen now the soldier wasn’t dead, but right now it was more important to check on the status of the offspring.  From his vantage point he could see what he hadn’t been able to before – that there weren’t enough small bodies laying around the crate.  Quickly he scanned the area, ignoring Helen’s faint words as she uttered another one of her lies in response to his other self’s question.

There!  Was that a flicker of movement, climbing up the northern ridge?  Nick gestured to Jacobs, pointing out what he had spotted.  Jacobs looked through his binoculars, nodded once, and then despatched two of his men towards the spot, instructing them to stay unseen and unheard.

Down below everything was progressing much more quickly than last time.  Now that Ryan wasn’t dead, Nick and Helen had no body to bury.  Helen still tried to convince Nick to stay with her, to help her find the future-anomaly, but with Ryan still around she couldn’t be as direct about it, and the attempt was half-hearted at best.  And then the three of them were heading back in the direction of the anomaly, Nick and Helen supporting Ryan between them.  The soldier was injured, but could apparently stand, although not without assistance.

Jacobs sent Anders to follow them discreetly, telling him to report back with information about the anomaly after they had gone through.  Then he, Nick, Stephen, and the two remaining soldiers set off in the direction of the northern ridge, intent on catching up with the offspring and the two soldiers they had sent to round them up.

Nick placed himself beside Captain Jacobs as they walked.  “What happened back there?” he asked quietly.  “You and I, and everyone else here, know that Captain Ryan should be dead.  But he’s not.  And one of your men is responsible for that.”

Jacobs sighed.  “You’re right,” he acknowledged.  “But it wasn’t one of my men.  It was me.  I’m sorry, Professor, but we’ve all seen to much death as a result of these anomalies.  I couldn’t let Captain Ryan die…again.  I fired at the predator, and pushed it off balance enough that it didn’t strike Ryan full-on.  No one down there seemed to notice.” He gestured back towards the campsite.  “I guess they were all too preoccupied with other things to register two more stray gunshots.”

“But I _told_ you what might happen if we changed anything!” said Nick angrily.  He had thought Captain Jacobs was a rational man, someone he could trust.  Apparently that wasn’t the case.

“But nothing has happened!” Jacobs retorted back.  “We’re all still here.  The predator’s offspring are still at large, and we’re still carrying out our mission exactly as we should.  The only thing that’s different is that a good man _didn’t_ die.”

Nick wanted to argue.  He really did.  Who knew what far-reaching consequences Jacobs’ actions could have?  But he realised that, at least in part, he agreed with the soldier.  Ryan wasn’t dead.  And even though he knew he should, Nick couldn’t bring himself to regret that.

“Don’t worry, Professor,” said Jacobs, breaking into his thoughts.  “As soon as we get home I’ll report myself to my superiors.  I disobeyed orders, and I deserve some kind of retribution for that.  But I won’t pretend I’m not glad that Ryan is still alive.”

“When we get home you can do whatever you want, Captain,” replied Nick shortly.  “Right now we have to concentrate on finding the offspring.  And the future-anomaly.”


	6. Chapter 6

 

It wasn’t long before Nick, Stephen, and the remaining soldiers caught up with the two men Jacobs had despatched to pin down the predator’s offspring.  In fact, they heard them before they saw them – eerie yowling shrieks indicating that they had, at last, cornered the babies.

Nick hurried forward to inspect the offspring, one of which was being held by each soldier, albeit it at arm’s length to keep their faces out of range of the swiping claws.  Both babies seemed unharmed by their encounter with the Gorgonopsid, and despite their obvious fright at being manhandled by a pair of humans, they were still almost (as Connor had once observed) cute.  However, having seen what they would become, and knowing the havoc they could potentially create, Nick felt no inclination to take pity on them.

He glanced around and caught Jacobs’ eye, nodding once, almost imperceptibly.  Jacobs hefted his rifle slightly, getting ready to do what they both knew was necessary.

But Stephen caught both movements.  “Wait!” he said suddenly.

Nick sighed.  “You know we have to do this, Stephen,” he said wearily.

“I know,” Stephen replied.  “Don’t get me wrong, I know we have to kill them – we can’t let them live.  But maybe we can use them first.”

“How?” asked Jacobs.

“Maybe they can help us find the future-anomaly.”

“But we _know_ they won’t go back to the future-anomaly,” Nick pointed out.  “Helen told us that much, at least.  They don’t _want_ to go home.”

“Maybe they won’t actually _lead_ us to the anomaly,” Stephen conceded.  “But they might be able to indicate to us when we’re near it.  I know Helen could never find it, but it can’t be that far away.  We’re fairly sure that only the two predators we’ve encountered have come through the future-anomaly so far, right?”

Nick nodded.

“And we know that didn’t happen too long before they found their way through to our time period.”

Another nod.

“So isn’t it reasonable to assume that the predators wouldn’t have had much time to move a long way from their home anomaly?  It seems likely that it would be around here _somewhere_.”

Nick considered.  “You’re probably right,” he agreed eventually.  “Although that doesn’t explain why Helen could never find it.  We know she wouldn’t have given up easily.”

“All the more reason to keep the babies around for a little longer,” answered Stephen.  “If it’s that well hidden, then we’ll definitely need them to help us find it.”

“That’s always assuming that they’re sensitive enough to it to feel it when it’s nearby,” Nick muttered.

But Stephen could tell that he had won Nick over, and he felt a little flash of triumph.  Finally someone was listening to him again.

Nick looked at Jacobs again.  “Captain, have we got anything we can use to hold the babies?” he asked.

“Not with us,” replied Jacobs.  “But we could probably reuse the crate they were brought here in originally.  I’m sure we can fix it up enough to hold the offspring effectively.”

“Okay, that sounds good,” said Nick.  “But we’ll have to be quick.  Helen will be coming back through the anomaly soon, and you can bet she’ll head right back to the campsite, to try and pick up the babies’ trail.  She knows they’re still alive, but she doesn’t know that we’re here, and that we have them.  And I’d like to keep it that way.  We need to get out of here as soon as possible.”

*   *   *   *   * 

It was hot in the Permian.  And dry.  And dusty.  And _bright_.  The sunlight seemed about ten times more intense here than it did at home, and Stephen’s eyes were aching from having to squint continuously.  Although he supposed it didn’t help that they were walking directly towards the sunset.

They had been travelling for about three hours, moving in a westerly direction.  The soldiers had fixed the carrying crate from the campsite in fairly short order, and they had managed to get away from the area before Anders reported in with the news that Helen had reappeared through the anomaly.  Luckily, after inspecting the campsite, she had moved off to the south, which gave them a bit of breathing space.  But Nick had learned not to underestimate his wife – she had spent far more time here than they had, and there was still more than a slight chance that she would find them.  They would need to keep an eye-out for her.

Anders had also reported that the anomaly had pulled the same trick as before, disappearing and reappearing in quick succession after Helen had come back through.  This earned Stephen an annoyed look from Nick – he had forgotten to mention it before, caught up in the excitement and weirdness of the events at the campsite – but no request for any further explanation.

About a half-hour after he had radioed through this information, Anders himself caught up with them, and they proceeded on as fast as they could while hampered by the babies, and all their equipment.

But now the sun was setting, indicating that the day was coming to an end, and Stephen wondered if he should mention something about setting up camp.  They had brought all the gear necessary for an expedition of several days, much of it hi-tech and cutting edge.  But Stephen knew from painful experience that, no matter how up-to-date your tent was, it would always take you longer to erect it than you anticipated.  Even those tents that were supposedly self-erecting invariably had a habit of going wrong, leaving a not-so-happy camper with a mess of canvas and poles to sort out.

They were currently walking along the flat ground at the bottom of an escarpment, a place that seemed to Stephen as good as any for a camping spot.  The ground was smooth, they would have a good view of anything coming towards them from one side, and the escarpment itself would provide good protection on the other side.  Looking up at the debris-littered slope, Stephen was willing to bet that nothing would willingly try and negotiate a route down it.

Stephen opened his mouth to make his suggestion, hoping that Nick at least was still willing to listen to him.  However, he got no further than “hey, guys, shouldn’t we…” before he was drowned out by a sudden outburst of shrieking from the offspring.

All the soldiers’ hands sprang to their guns, and everyone looked wildly around for any approaching danger.

But there was still enough light to show them they were alone.  There weren’t even any of the true Permian residents near them, although Stephen could see a herd of _Scutosaurus_ off in the far distance.

So what were the babies shrieking at?  With a slowly dawning sense of elation, Stephen realised that he had, after all, been right.  The offspring were indicating the presence of an anomaly nearby, as he had hoped they would.  He resisted the urge to say “I told you so.”  That wasn’t going to do anything to endear him to Nick, particularly since the man had already agreed with his hypothesis, however reluctantly.

But where was the anomaly?  Stephen looked around again, scanning the landscape more carefully.  But it was no good.  Open ground ran out from the base of the escarpment for several hundred yards, with nothing on it to conceal an anomaly.  And that put the closest patches of scrub too far away for the babies to sense an anomaly if it was hidden there.

That only left one option.  With a sinking feeling, Stephen turned and surveyed the escarpment as it loomed over him.  There were plenty of rocky outcroppings, and nooks and crannies up there that could be screening an anomaly.  And Stephen was rapidly revising his opinion that nothing could climb down it.  They had all seen how agile the predators were – even this dangerous, scree-covered slope probably wouldn’t provide that much of a problem for them.

Nick’s eyes followed Stephen’s gaze up the escarpment.  “You think it’s up there?” he asked quietly.

“Seems like the logical conclusion,” Stephen replied.  “It would explain why Helen was never able to find it.”

“But how are we going to reach it?” said Jacobs, stepping up beside Nick, his own eyes on the slope in front of them.

“Someone’s going to have to climb up there and look for it,” said Nick.

“Well, we did bring some climbing equipment,” offered Jacobs.  “But none of my men has any experience in rock-climbing.”

There was silence for a few seconds, and then Stephen sighed.  “I do,” he admitted.  “But I haven’t climbed in over two years, and even then I only knew the basics.”

“Are you good enough to get up there?” Jacobs asked dubiously.

“I don’t know,” Stephen replied honestly.  “The slope isn’t vertical, so that should help some.  But the surface looks loose and slippery, and that’s something I _haven’t_ had any experience with.  But I’ll give it a go.”

Twenty minutes later Stephen stood at the foot of the escarpment, trying to work out the best way to ascend it.  The sun still hadn’t set, but it was low enough in the sky that much of the rock-face was in shadow – something that would only make his task harder.  In a rare moment of concern, Nick had pointed out that they could leave this until tomorrow, but Stephen had refused.  They had to move quickly on this, needing to at least _find_ the anomaly before darkness fell, even if they couldn’t do anything about it until the sun rose again.

One of Jacobs’ men, named Carter, stood next to him.  Stephen had nominated him as his belayer – Carter was the biggest and strongest of the soldiers, most able to stop Stephen from falling very far if he should lose his grip.  He had given Carter a quick lesson in the basics, which had helped to refresh his own memory too.

“Just pay out the line slowly and steadily as I climb.  If I slip or fall, pull straight down on the rope _firmly_.  The belay device will kick in and stop the rope from paying out any more.  I should only fall a few feet.”

He had made Carter practice the movement several times until he was confident the soldier knew what he was doing.  Now Stephen just hoped he knew what _he_ was doing.  He had forgotten how much there was to think about while climbing – finding places to plant the cams in the rock, keeping your body weight spread and balanced across the rock-face, keeping the rope from becoming tangled, testing hand and footholds properly before trusting them…the list was endless.  Not to mention that he had never done this without a more experienced climber to help him.

But now he was the experienced climber, and the only one who could find the anomaly.  He had no choice.

Taking a deep breath, Stephen started forward, leaving Carter behind on the flat ground.  For the first twenty metres or so the escarpment wasn’t at much more than a 45º angle, and he was scrambling more than climbing, with no need to place any of his cams.  If he slipped now the worst that would happen would be that he gained a few scrapes and bruises as he slid back to the bottom.

But all too soon the angle of the slope increased to about 60º, and it was time to start climbing for real.

Pausing at the bottom of the steeper slope, Stephen looked around for a suitable crevice in which to place his first cam.  It took a few seconds, but he finally spotted a likely candidate.  Reaching up above his head, he jammed the device into the rock, and clipped his rope to it.  Cautiously he tugged on the line, gently at first, then more firmly.  The cam held, and Stephen let out his breath, which he hadn’t even realised he’d been holding.  Of course, the true test of a cam came when it needed to hold your weight if you fell, but Stephen wasn’t going to worry about that yet.  There was no sense in borrowing more trouble than he was already facing.

He let the line go slack and breathed deeply for a few seconds, steadying his frayed nerves.  Then he started to climb.

Twenty minutes later he had climbed a grand total of fifteen metres, and he wasn’t sure that he was going to be able to go that much further.  The mental and physical stress the climb was placing on his body was becoming too much to handle.  His muscles were screaming in protest at holding up his entire weight, and his nerves were dangerously close to breaking.  Every time he trusted his weight to a handhold he wondered if it was going to be strong enough to hold him, or if he was going to end up plummeting back down the rock-face.  He’d had a couple of scares already, but each time had managed to catch himself before he fell.  Logically, he knew that even if he did lose his grip he wouldn’t fall very far – he trusted Carter to tighten off the belay line if something should happen.

Stephen could feel the eyes of all the men below him boring into his back, and it was that which had kept him going more than anything else.  No one else could do what he was doing, no matter how inexpertly he was doing it.  If the anomaly was up here, he was the only person who could find it.  What they would do once he had accomplished that was a problem he would consider later.

Slowly, carefully, Stephen unlatched another cam from his harness and wedged it into the crevice he had selected for it.  Latching his rope on to it, he tested it until he was sure it was firm, and then started looking around for his next handhold.  A jutting piece of rock seemed to fit the bill, and he reached up and tugged on it, trying to ignore the threatening cramp in the fingers of his other hand.

The rock was solid.  Taking a second to shake the tension out of his fingers, he reached for it again.

There was a sudden sparkle of light in the corner of his vision.  Of their own volition his eyes flicked towards it and away from his reaching hand…

He missed the handhold.  His body, expecting to be supported on its right side, lurched downwards, jarring his right foot from its perch.  There was a sickening moment where he felt like he was suspended in mid air, and then he was falling.

“Stephen!”

Stephen barely heard the cry of alarm from below him.  It was swallowed up in the rushing, crunching noise of the scree underneath him as he slithered down it.  He wondered what it would feel like when he hit the bottom…

Suddenly, he was brought to a standstill with a sharp jerk.  The climbing harness tightened around him, and the breath was forced from his body.  For a few seconds he was afraid to open his eyes, not wanting to see the damage that had been inflicted on his body by the impact.  But then he realised that was stupid, and gingerly lifted his eyelids.

He had fallen no more than six feet.  A combination of Carter’s quick thinking, and Stephen’s own foot jamming against a protrusion he remembered using on the way up, had halted his descent before it had even really begun.

Quickly he took stock of his injuries.  He could feel blood trickling down his face where he had scraped it against the rock, and his knee was throbbing where he had banged it on something – no doubt he would have a spectacular bruise there in the not-too-distant future.  Otherwise, he seemed to be okay.

Looking down, he could see several upturned faces, all looking worried.  And was it his imagination, or did Nick look the most concerned?

He waved at them.  “It’s alright, I’m okay,” he called hoarsely, coughing slightly around the dust and grit that seemed to have lodged itself in his throat.

Then his mind jumped back to what had caused him to fall in the first place.  “I think I’ve found the anomaly,” he yelled.

Nick’s voice floated up to him.  “Are you sure?”

“Pretty sure,” he replied.  “Just give me a few minutes and I’ll check.”

Taking a few deep breaths, Stephen set about rearranging himself on the rock-face, and resuming his climb.  After a few minutes, he reached the point he had fallen from and, making sure he had a firm grip this time, turned his head carefully in the direction the light had come from.

There was no doubt about it.  He had found the anomaly.  Now that he was looking more closely, Stephen could discern a ledge protruding from the escarpment, with a cleft running back into the rocks behind it.  The anomaly sat at the far end of the cleft, sparkling innocuously.  It was impossible to see from above or below.  In fact, if Stephen hadn’t climbed up the escarpment at precisely this point, it was entirely possible he would have missed it altogether.

“It’s definitely here,” he called, trying to disguise how relieved he was that he wouldn’t have to climb any further.

Shuffling sideways across the rock-face, he heaved himself on to the ledge, fighting the urge to just collapse on it from sheer exhaustion.  The cleft was wide enough to allow passage for a man…or a predator, but Stephen didn’t approach the anomaly.  For now it was enough just to know it was here.  He just needed to rest for a few moments, and then he would start back down.

*   *   *   *   * 

Stephen’s eyes snapped open, taking him from asleep to alert in no more than half a second.  But what had woken him?  The inside of the tent was pitch black, and Stephen suspected he wouldn’t be able to see his hand five inches in front of his face, even assuming that he was able to untangle his arm from his sleeping-bag.

“Stephen!”

The hoarse whisper floated out of the darkness from somewhere to his left.  It was Nick’s voice.

The two of them had had no choice but to share a tent.  The even number of people in the group had meant that everyone had to pair off, and none of the soldiers seemed particularly eager to share their sleeping space with a civilian.  The fact that Nick wasn’t particularly eager to share his sleeping space with Stephen didn’t seem to have crossed their minds.

But neither of them had any say in the matter.  And besides, by the time he had climbed rather shakily back down the escarpment, Stephen was too exhausted to kick up much of a fuss.  He had allowed the Special Forces field medic, Rees, to patch up his injuries, and had then crawled straight into his sleeping-bag.  He had been just about alert enough to notice that Nick was avoiding looking at him even more emphatically than usual, but had been asleep before he’d had time to consider what that meant.

And now he was awake again.  And the tiredness he could still feel around his eyes told him he had been asleep for no more than three or four hours.

“Stephen!” Nick whispered again.

“I’m awake.  What is it?”

“Something’s come through the anomaly.”

Stephen immediately felt the dread coalesce in the pit of his stomach – it was almost a physical sensation.  Nick hadn’t said what the ‘something’ was, but by the tone of his voice Stephen just knew it was one of the future-predators.

They had set up camp at the bottom of the escarpment, a short distance from where Stephen had ascended and found the anomaly.  The soldiers had set up a guard rota to keep an eye on the anomaly precisely in case something like this happened.  They were all hardened military types – not likely to get spooked easily, even in the unfamiliar surroundings.  If one of them _thought_ they had seen something, it was more than likely that they actually had.

Stephen extracted himself from his sleeping-bag as quietly as he could.  The fact that Nick had been whispering indicated that silence was required – although whether that was so the soldiers could pinpoint the predator, or so the predator _couldn’t_ pinpoint them, Stephen didn’t know.  He suspected the latter.

Slowly, and a little awkwardly in the darkness, he and Nick crawled to the entrance of their tent.  Stephen barely restrained a hiss of pain as Nick’s elbow knocked against the gauze protecting the scrape on his cheek.

But when he pushed aside the tent-flap, he was surprised to see that it was much lighter outside – close to dawn, in fact.  He had been asleep longer than he thought.

The silhouettes of the soldiers were clearly visible at various points around the camp.  Even in the half-light Stephen could see they looked tense – on the lookout for any danger or surprise attacks.

Turning his head, he caught Nick’s eye as Nick turned to look at him.  A flash of mutual agreement passed between them.  Reaching back into the tent, Stephen fished around quietly for the handgun he had taken to carrying with him ever since this whole mad sequence of events had started.  He only wished he had one to give to Nick as well.  Nick always claimed to disapprove of guns, but Stephen would be willing to bet he was wishing he had one right now.

Still moving quietly, Stephen and Nick emerged fully from the tent, but remained crouching beside it, as it offered practically the only available cover in the immediate vicinity.  Not that a few poles and sheets of nylon would protect them from a rampaging predator.  But it provided an illusion of safety, at least for the moment.

The soldiers were communicating to each other with hand signals.  Stephen couldn’t see the gestures very well, but he could just about deduce what they were saying.  It seemed that after the initial alert, everything had gone quiet again.  But Stephen could tell none of them were fooled.  Hell, he wasn’t fooled.  The future-predators were clever.  They were waiting for something…

Suddenly, with no warning, the sun lifted itself over the horizon.  The light was dazzling, and both Stephen and Nick raised their hands to shield their eyes.  The soldiers, who were all wearing night-vision goggles, cursed as the sensors on the equipment were overloaded with light, temporarily blinding them.  To a man they ripped them off hurriedly, but precious seconds were lost as their eyes readjusted.

And in those seconds, something attacked.

  1. If Nick noticed the movement, he didn’t say anything, but Stephen at least felt slightly better about their situation now.



Straining all his senses, Stephen tried to identify where the next attack might come from.  The effort was probably futile – he knew that.  The predators had senses that he couldn’t even begin to understand.  They definitely had the advantage here.

But no attack came.  The sun continued to climb above the horizon, and the light became less fierce.  They could all see much more clearly now – the predators had lost the element of surprise.  They had no cover any more.  The soldiers would see them coming.

Gradually, as it became apparent that they had indeed been given a respite, everyone relaxed slightly.  A quick head-count revealed that two of the soldiers were missing – Rees and Maguire.  Rees’ had been the voice they’d heard, but Maguire had been taken without so much as a whisper – another demonstration of the ruthlessness and efficiency of the predators.

Stephen watched the soldiers as they went through the business of checking and preparing their equipment once again.  It was obvious they were upset about the loss of their colleagues, but equally obvious that they didn’t want any of the sympathy that Nick and Stephen were feeling for them.  They would grieve later – right now they had a job to do.

Stephen himself felt bad that he hadn’t known the two soldiers better.  Rees he had at least had some contact with, when the man had patched him up the night before.  They hadn’t talked much, but the soldier had been friendly enough, and he had gone about his work with quiet competence.  But Maguire Stephen hadn’t known at all.  In fact, he couldn’t even recall speaking to him, not even once.  And for some reason that made him feel guilty.

Oh well, it wasn’t like he wasn’t familiar with the feeling.

*   *   *   *   * 

The afternoon sun was as hot as it had been the day before, and Nick idly wondered whether the temperatures here were always this high, or whether they were simply visiting at the height of summer.  The arid landscape suggested the former, but Nick wished he had more time to study this place.  He wished he were here as a scientist and not as a man on some kind of rescue mission.

Even though the ‘rescue’ part of his mission seemed very far away right now.

Hours had passed since the initial attack, and there had been neither sight nor sound of the predators since.  Nick had come to the conclusion that there was only one – two at most – of the creatures.  Any more than that, and they would have obliterated the small group of humans with no trouble at all, even without the advantage of the sunrise on their side.

He was also sure that no more predators had come through the anomaly in the intervening period.  Although they couldn’t see the anomaly itself from their campsite, they had a clear line of sight to the opening of the cleft in the rock-face, and two of the soldiers had been on watch at all times, while the other two made preparations to defend themselves more effectively.

Jacobs had decided against moving the camp to another site.  The only benefit that would have would be the possibility of confusing the predators by shifting location.  But Nick had pointed out that the creatures were far too clever to be fooled by a trick like that – they might not be human, but they weren’t animals either.  They were intelligent.  Plus they were probably watching the camp anyway, even though they couldn’t be seen.  All they would have to do would be to follow right to any new site.

The current campsite also had several advantages.  It was close to the anomaly, so they could at least be warned early if anything else came through it.  It had the protection of the escarpment on one side of it.  And it was on open ground, with nowhere close by for anything to hide, and an uninterrupted view for several hundred yards around.

And that was one of the reasons it was so hot.  The only shade to be had was the tents, but it was so stuffy inside the nylon structures as to be almost unbearable.  They had plenty of water – there was a spring within sight – but they had no way to keep it cool in their drinking bottles, and Jacobs had forbidden anyone to spend longer at the spring than absolutely necessary, particularly after Nick had mentioned that predators often chose to attack their prey when they were drinking and their guard was down.

The soldiers were keeping themselves busy and their minds off the heat by watching the anomaly, and by setting up defences around the camp.  Jacobs had shown Nick and Stephen some hi-tech perimeter equipment that he planned to use.  It created some kind of electronic barrier that triggered an alarm if it was broken.  That way they would at least know if there were any threats headed towards them.  The only problem was that, in this situation, they would have to run it off batteries, and therefore they would have to wait to switch it on until dusk, when their visibility was reduced again.  And even then Jacobs wasn’t sure quite how long the batteries would last, although he thought at least eight hours.  That would be enough to see them through to another dawn, if nothing else.

Nick and Stephen, however, had nothing to distract them from their discomfort except each other.  But, surprisingly enough, what both would have considered the inevitable argument hadn’t occurred.  They had discussed possible ways to stop the predators coming through the anomaly, and potential methods of shutting down the anomaly, for hours, but hadn’t come up with any sort of solution.  But Nick had been reminded how helpful he found it talking problems like this over with Stephen, even as he was uncomfortably aware that by doing so, he was giving off the impression that he might be thawing slightly towards his friend.  Which, he admitted grudgingly to himself, might well be the case.  But he wasn’t sure he wanted Stephen to know that just yet.  There were still things he couldn’t forgive, and he needed more time to think.

But for now, he had run out of time.  Dusk was fast approaching, and it was time for everyone to turn their attention back to the problem at hand.  For one wild moment, Nick wondered if maybe he shouldn’t just forgive Stephen and clear the air between them right there and then.  After all, they could all be dead by the morning.

But then Jacobs was calling everybody into the centre of the camp for a final briefing, and the opportunity was gone.  Not that Nick really knew if he would have taken it or not.

As the light faded around them, Jacobs outlined the plan one more time.  Now that everyone was in the middle of the camp, they were to stay there.  Stationing sentries would only result in the men chosen for the task getting killed, and besides, the perimeter technology would tell them if anything was approaching.  Jacobs had turned off the audio part of the warning system, so that it wouldn’t alert the predators to the presence of the perimeter, and had stationed Nick by the control panel for the equipment, so he could notify Jacobs if any of the visual alarm indicators – otherwise known as little flashing lights – went off.

The soldiers, and Stephen, were to form a tight cordon around Nick, with a pair of eyes facing in every direction.  Nick had thought about protesting that he didn’t need protecting, but he knew that, in a situation like this, such a protest would only be a lie.  And besides, there was only one spare pair of night-vision goggles, which Jacobs had given to Stephen, him being the better shot.  The soldier had also given Stephen an automatic rifle similar to the ones the other men were carrying, and had passed Stephen’s handgun on to Nick.  It wouldn’t be much help if a predator was leaping right on top of him, but the feel of it in his hand made Nick feel just the tiniest bit better.

By now full darkness had fallen, the sun long since disappeared over the horizon, and the moon yet to rise.  This could be the most dangerous moment, and everybody held their breaths, the tension in the air palpable.

But for nearly an hour nothing happened, and Nick allowed himself to hope a little.  Maybe the predators had simply moved on.  There was, after all, other prey in the Permian – prey without automatic rifles and the ability to see them coming in the dark.  Maybe the predators had decided the humans were more trouble than they were worth.

But even as he thought this he recognised the hope for what it was – a false one.  If the predators were going to leave them alone, why had they even bothered attacking them that morning?  Why bother killing two of Jacobs’ men?  They could easily have gone on their way, leaving Nick, Stephen, and the soldiers none the wiser.

Seconds later his realisation was proved correct, as not one, but two, of the lights on the perimeter control panel started flashing.  Each light on the panel indicated a separate stretch of the perimeter, and so Nick could tell Jacobs exactly from where the predators were approaching.

Reaching slowly to his left, Nick tapped Jacobs’ hip twice, the prearranged signal for indicating he had something to say.  “Movement in the south-east and south-west,” he whispered softly, and heard the news being relayed round to the other soldiers and Stephen.

A few seconds later Nick heard Jacobs mutter “got them”, and realised that all the soldiers must be able to see the approaching predators through their goggles, while Nick himself could see practically nothing in the darkness except the flashing lights on the panel, which were too dim to illuminate anything except his immediate surroundings.  His blindness suddenly made him feel very exposed, despite the soldiers around him.

“Get ready,” Jacobs muttered, and Nick resisted the urge to cover his ears against the imminent cacophony of gunfire.

But instead of the rattle of bullets, the air was suddenly filled with an eerie keening wail that cut through the silence like a knife.  It was coming from nearby, but much closer than the predators could be at this point, and it took Nick a couple of seconds to work out what it was.

“The offspring!” he hissed.  He had almost forgotten they were there, they’d been so quiet.  Then he realised something else.  “The babies are drawing the adults to us,” he said a little more loudly, trying to make sure that Jacobs heard him.  “That’s why they haven’t simply moved on.  Even though these aren’t their biological offspring, some kind of protective instinct is driving the adults to try and rescue the juveniles.”

But anything Jacobs might have been about to say in response was drowned out by a loud screech from the darkness.

“Incoming!  We have incoming!” one of the soldiers – possibly Anders – yelled.  There was a burst of automatic rifle fire, and a second screech from one of the predators.

“Hostile is down.  Repeat, hostile is down,” said Anders clearly.

“What about the second one?” asked Nick quickly.  “Is it still there?”

There was a split second of silence, and then Jacobs spoke quietly.

“Does anyone have a fix on the second predator?”

More silence.  And then Stephen answered.

“It vanished.  It was there one moment, and the next it was gone.”

“It can’t just have vanished,” Jacobs protested.

“It’s dark, we were distracted by the other creature, and by the offspring,” Stephen offered.  “And besides, these creatures have already demonstrated that they have tracking and hunting skills far superior to our own.  Who knows what other attributes they might have?”

“It’s probably still out there, watching us,” interjected Nick quietly, unwilling to let Stephen and Jacobs get into a debate.  “It knows we have the babies, and it knows they’re still alive.  At this point I think we have to assume it’s going to try anything to get them back.”  He paused.  “We need to remove them from the equation.  Right now.”

He looked up at Stephen and Jacobs.  He could barely see their faces in the darkness, but he hoped their expressions were agreeing with him.

“Granted, getting rid of the offspring probably won’t improve our situation any.  We may just anger the adult further.  But we have nothing left to gain from having them around, and there is a slim possibility that removing them might make the adult leave us alone.”  Nick knew he sounded like he was justifying his actions – he just wasn’t sure who he was justifying them to.

“Do you want me to do it?” Stephen asked quietly.

“No,” replied Nick firmly.  “This is something I have to do.  You lot just keep an eye out for the adult.”

“Any gunshots will probably alert it to what we’re doing,” Stephen warned.

“I know,” said Nick.  “That’s why you need to be ready.”

He looked down into the crate that held the offspring – he could see enough to discern that they weren’t moving, and were looking up at him, almost as if they knew what was about to happen to them.

Nick swallowed, thankful that Stephen and Jacobs had turned back to their surveillance of the surrounding area.  He didn’t need any more pairs of eyes watching him.

This was ridiculous.  He had done this before – he had shot one of the original adult predators, for heaven’s sake!  But somehow it was more difficult when the target was a defenceless infant.

Nick stiffened his resolve.  This had to be done, and that was that.  Slowly, he pointed the handgun down into the box, breathing deeply to steady himself.  Then, between one breath and the next, he fired.  Twice.

The noise was deafening, but it quickly died away into silence.  None of the armed men surrounding him so much as looked his way – they trusted that he had done what he had to, and they needed to keep an eye out for the other predator.  Nick was grateful for the privacy – his hands were shaking, and he could feel the nausea rising in his throat.  By sheer effort of will he stopped himself from retching, but it was a near thing.

He wondered what the reaction from the predator would be, now the offspring had been eliminated.  He doubted that it would just give up and leave.  He doubted it very much.

Suddenly finding himself unable to stand any more, Nick half-crouched, half-slumped next to the perimeter control panel, trying to avoid knocking it as he slid gracelessly to the floor.

And it was that which probably saved his life.

There was an ear-splitting shriek from the darkness.  It was close – much closer than the perimeter.  Nick had barely time to look up before a huge dark shape was looming over him.  It seemed to be falling from directly above him, and landed with a crash on top of the control panel, smashing it to smithereens.  Had Nick still been standing, he would probably have been knocked off his feet and killed instantly.  But his position crouched by the panel had offered him some protection.

Not that he was going to be protected for much longer.  The predator seemed to be tangled up in the wreckage of the panel and the platform it had been standing on, but it was no more than three feet away, and one good swipe with its claws would take Nick’s head off.

Frantically he scrabbled around for the handgun, but he had dropped it after shooting the offspring, and in the darkness and confusion he couldn’t locate it again.

There was shouting all around him, but the voices were confused, and no one appeared to be trying to shoot the predator.  Nick tried to shout back, but found that his throat was dry and full of dust – the most he could manage was a dull grunt.

Then, suddenly, the predator stopped thrashing, and Nick looked back at it in trepidation.

It was free.

But it was just looking at him.  Like it didn’t know what to make of him.  Nick looked back, searching in the creature’s eyes for signs of the intelligence he knew it possessed.

But he saw nothing.  The creature was too alien, too far removed from humanity.  He couldn’t communicate with it.

Then, as it growled low in its throat, Nick suddenly knew that this was it.  The time had come.  It was going to kill him.

He closed his eyes.

The sharp report of gunfire made him open them again.

The predator was lying sprawled on the floor in front of him.  It was clearly dead.  And standing over it was Stephen, the lost handgun firmly in his grip.

*   *   *   *   * 

Stephen edged his way slowly up the escarpment for the second time in three days.  It was much easier this time – he was more confident of his abilities, he knew where the best hand and footholds were already, and the cams he had placed to attach his rope to were still in position, which left his hands much freer to grip the rocks.

Still, he didn’t flatter himself that he had even half of the skill a competent rock-climber would have, never mind an expert.  But he needed to be sure he could do this, and he needed to be sure of the route up to the anomaly site.  Because, now that they weren’t in immediate danger any more, they had to turn their attention back to the anomaly.  And that meant that he had to be able to get more than just himself up here.  At the very least Nick was going to have to make it as well.

Nick.  Now there was a problem that had recently gained an extra dimension, as if it didn’t have enough already.

He had saved Nick’s life.  In the confusion of the attack none of the soldiers had wanted to risk shooting the predator in case they shot Nick instead.  Stephen had been closest to Nick, and was therefore best able to see what was going on, but he’d had his rifle knocked out of his hand by the passing of the predator.  He had scrambled as close to Nick and the creature as he could, the noise of his approach masked by the shouting of the soldiers and the thrashing of the predator in the wreckage of the control panel.

Then he had spotted the handgun, lying where Nick had dropped it.  After that everything had seemed ridiculously simple.  Aim the gun, pull the trigger.  The predator had been about to kill Nick, but then Stephen had killed it instead.  Ergo, he had saved Nick’s life.

Nick had been grateful – who wouldn’t be?  He had said thank you, and the gratitude was clear in his eyes.  But that was it.  After that he had quietly gone about his business, helping Anders to dispose of the bodies of the offspring, while Stephen had helped Jacobs assess the shattered remains of their camp.

It wasn’t that Stephen expected any greater show of emotion or anything.  There was no sense in getting worked up about the situation.  It had happened, disaster had been averted, end of story.  They had other things to concentrate on.

In fact, it was almost as if Nick had expected something more from Stephen.  Perhaps he had expected Stephen to be more triumphant about the whole thing, as if he now held a bargaining chip that would get him back into Nick’s good books.

But Stephen didn’t feel triumphant.  He just felt relief.  For one horrible second he had thought that Nick was going to die, that he would never get to patch things up with his friend, that he would never get to see what happened between them.  But then the means to avert Nick’s death had come into his hands, and he had acted on them.  And so Nick was alive to fight another day.  They had another chance.  That was all that mattered to Stephen.

Stephen shook his head slightly.  He didn’t need to be thinking about all this now.  He couldn’t afford to get distracted up here, especially not after what had happened last time.  He needed to concentrate.

He had reached the point level with the opening of the cleft in the rock-face – the point from where he had first glimpsed the anomaly.  Funny, he couldn’t seem to see it this time.  Maybe he was approaching from a slightly different angle?

But he couldn’t be, because there was the cam – the last one before he had to start scooting sideways across the escarpment.  He must be in the same place as before.  So why couldn’t he see the anomaly?

With a feeling that was somewhere between excitement and dread, Stephen shuffled across to the cleft as fast as he dared, heaving himself up on to the ledge and peering through the gap in the rocks.

No anomaly.  It was gone.  The cleft was full of nothing but shadows.

At least, that was his first impression.

He was just about to turn away to call down to the people waiting below him when someone spoke.

“It closed up early this morning, shortly after I found it.”

“Helen,” Stephen greeted her wearily.  He hadn’t even flinched – somehow it seemed incredibly apt that she should be here.

“I suppose I should be grateful you don’t have a gun this time,” she said, stepping out of the shadows slightly.  Stephen could see her clearly now, although she still wasn’t visible to the people below.  But he suspected that Nick, at least, would work out what was going on when he saw Stephen apparently talking to a bunch of rocks.  Either that, or he would figure the anomaly had sent him insane.

“You should,” he responded succinctly.  The hardness of his tone caused Helen to raise one eyebrow slightly, even as her smile told him what she thought of his threat.

“What do you want _this_ time, Helen?” Stephen asked tiredly.  “You obviously know what’s going on here, _and_ you’ve found the anomaly – probably by following us.  Clearly you’re not the Helen Cutter who’s just revealed our secret to my best friend back in the present and has come back to the Permian to search for the offspring of the future-predators.”

“You’re right,” she answered.  “That version of me is still wandering around somewhere to the south of here, without a clue about where the offspring might be.”  She sounded faintly derisive of her past self, as though that person were a separate entity, and not connected to her in any way.

“So how did you find us this time?” said Stephen.  “You lost the ability to follow us after we saw you the last time, and I refuse to believe that it was just dumb luck that got you here at the right time.”

“The anomalies have stabilised,” Helen replied without preamble.  Her reply was so abrupt that for a second Stephen didn’t register the importance of what she’d said.  Then…

“What?  They have?  But that must mean we’ve succeeded in stopping the future-predators from affecting the past.”

“I would say so,” Helen said.

Something in her voice caught Stephen’s attention.  She almost sounded like she was mocking him.

“But how?” he wondered.  “What made the anomaly close?  Everything that’s happened up until now dictates that it should still be open, allowing the predators through.  We haven’t actually done anything that would cause it to close – all that’s happened is that we’ve killed the offspring and the two predators that came through two nights ago.”

“Maybe those predators were an advance guard or something,” offered Helen.  And when they didn’t go back to give the all clear to the rest of their species the predators decided that meant it wasn’t safe to come through.”

“Maybe,” mused Stephen.  “But that still doesn’t really explain why the anomaly closed.”  Then he looked at Helen sharply.  “Why are you helping me?” he asked abruptly.  “Surely you must benefit more if I – and Nick - _don’t_ figure out what’s going on?  That would leave the playing field clear for you, after all.”

“Stephen, I’m hurt!” Helen protested, her voice ringing with sincerity so false Stephen was surprised it didn’t choke her.

“Give it a rest, Helen,” he replied sourly.

Helen smiled.  “I can’t tell you why the anomaly closed when it did,” she said.  “But don’t you think you should just be grateful that it has?  It means you’ve solved your little problem.  You’ve prevented the predators from doing any more damage, and Nick will be reunited with his beloved Claudia.”  For just a second her smile faltered, and surprisingly Stephen found that he sympathised with her, just a little.  If everything went back to how Nick claimed it should be, he would indeed be able to pick up with Claudia where he had apparently left off.  The thought made something inside Stephen twist uncomfortably.

“I have to get back and give Nick the good news,” he said abruptly, trying to sound as if he _really_ thought it was good news.  “Are you coming with me?”

“Well, here’s a role-reversal,” said Helen lightly.  “Now you’re asking me to come with _you_.”  She grinned at the look on Stephen’s face.  “No, I don’t think I’ll be joining your little party.  I wouldn’t want to cramp anyone’s style.”

“Fine,” replied Stephen shortly.  “I guess I’ll be seeing you around, then.”  He sounded as if he wished the opposite were true.

“Oh, you can count on it.”

Helen watched as Stephen turned away and started to clamber back down the escarpment.  He didn’t look back up at her once, and therefore didn’t see the small smile of triumph that crossed her face.

When she had said she couldn’t tell him why the anomaly had closed, she hadn’t lied…exactly.  She couldn’t.  Because that would have meant he would have forced her to go with him, to tell Nick and Lester and everyone what she knew.  And Helen intended to keep that knowledge well and truly to herself.

Killing the offspring and the two attacking predators had stabilised the anomalies, which had meant she had been able to use them to her advantage once more.  The theory she had offered to Stephen about what had caused that stabilisation was actually the one she considered to be the most likely.  And that was something she didn’t care if Stephen and Nick knew or not.

The sound of gunfire had drawn her to the campsite late last night, and she had quickly worked out where the anomaly must be.  But it had taken the remaining hours of darkness to circle round to the top of the escarpment and find a place where she could climb down to the anomaly from above.  And then she had settled down to wait for the inevitable visit from her former lover.

And now that Stephen was gone she could finally accomplish the ultimate goal.  As she turned back into the cleft, the anomaly suddenly shimmered back to life, almost as if she had flicked a switch.  Helen smiled.  The knowledge she possessed allowed her to control the anomalies more completely than Nick or Stephen could ever have guessed.  And it was an advantage she intended to use to its full potential.

Still smiling, Helen Cutter stepped forward into the future.

*   *   *   *   * 

“Helen was up there, wasn’t she?”

Nick had taken Stephen aside almost as soon as he had reached the bottom of the escarpment.  He’d barely had time to inform everyone that the anomaly had closed and their problem was solved, before Nick had all but dragged him away.  Stephen hoped this wasn’t going to turn into a confrontation about his and Helen’s past.

“Yes,” he replied shortly.

“What did she want?”

“I don’t know,” Stephen admitted.  “She was actually helpful, in a way.  She told me the anomalies had stabilised, and that we wouldn’t have any more problems with the future-predators.”

“But that’s not all she could have told you.”  Nick’s tone made it a statement, not a question, but Stephen replied anyway.

“Probably not,” he agreed.  “I think we’ve both learned by now not to take anything Helen says or does at face value.”

“So where is she now?”

“I don’t know that either,” said Stephen, wondering if this was going to earn him some kind of reprimand from Nick or Jacobs.  “I asked her if she would come with me.  Gave her a last chance to help, that kind of thing.  But unsurprisingly, she declined my kind offer.  And I couldn’t exactly drag her down from up there.”  He glanced up at the escarpment, almost as if he expected to see Helen watching him, mocking them all.  But the rock-face was empty.

“You could always have thrown her down,” mused Nick absently, following Stephen’s gaze.  Then he smiled to show that he was joking – well, half-joking.  “Well,” he continued more loudly.  “It seems our work here is done.  Captain Jacobs, what’s say we all go home?”

“That sounds like the best suggestion I’ve heard in ages,” replied Jacobs, before instructing his men to start packing up the camp.

“You know, we still don’t know what we’re going to find when we get home,” Stephen pointed out quietly.  “We’ve no idea what to expect.  Even the fact that we’re still here seems slightly odd to me.  Surely the laws of science, and all Connor’s favourite TV shows, dictate that we should have vanished when we altered our own past timeline.”

Nick smiled tiredly.  “Who knows what’s going to happen?” he said rhetorically.  “We can only wait and see.  And enjoy the fact that we didn’t just vanish off the face of the Earth in the middle of the Permian.”

*   *   *   *   * 

Nearly four hours later, Nick, Stephen, Jacobs, and the rest of the soldiers stood in front of the original anomaly.  It didn’t look any different than usual, and if Helen was right, it should take them back home, to both the time and place they had come from.

Nick and Stephen looked at each other.  “Well, here goes,” said Nick firmly.  He stepped forward into the shards of light.

A second later he emerged in the Forest of Dean.  Quickly he looked around.  Everything looked as it should.  Abby and Connor weren’t in evidence, but since it had been nearly forty-eight hours since they had left, Nick wasn’t really expecting them to still be here.  More worrying was the absence of Davis and Bradshaw, the two soldiers Jacobs had left behind to watch this side of the anomaly.  Where were they?

Behind him the anomaly pulsed again, and he turned to see Stephen emerging, closely followed by Jacobs and the rest of the soldiers.

“We got impatient,” Stephen said lightly.  He looked as if he were trying to decide whether to risk a smile.

“There’s no one here,” Nick informed him quickly.  “No Abby, no Connor, no Davis, no anyone.”

Jacobs caught the worried note in his voice and acted immediately, gesturing at his men to fan out, weapons at the ready.  But then Stephen raised a hand to stop them.

“Wait.  Can you hear that?”

Nick listened.  It sounded like a car.  “Yes, I can hear it,” he replied quietly.

Jacobs looked faintly relieved, but still didn’t order his men to lower their weapons.  Everyone waited tensely.

Seconds later a governmental 4x4 screeched into the clearing.  The engine died, the door opened, and someone got out.

“Would somebody like to tell me what the _hell_ is going on here?”


	7. Chapter 7

 

“Would somebody like to tell me what the _hell_ is going on here?”

There was a stunned silence.  Then…

“Claudia!  You’re here!”

Nick swept Claudia into a hug before she even had time question his bizarre statement.  And, angry as she was at him right at that moment, she couldn’t help but smile a little at Nick’s enthusiasm.  It had been a long time since someone had been quite _this_ happy to see her.

When he finally let her go she stepped back slightly, trying to catch her breath.  “Of course I’m here,” she said, trying to recapture some of the anger she’d been feeling moments earlier.  “Why wouldn’t I be?  What I want to know is why you lot are here.  And where you’ve come from.  And what on earth you’ve been doing.  Two days ago I get a frantic call from Abby saying you’ve all apparently disappeared off the face of planet, with not a clue about where you might have gone.  I’ve had search parties combing the forest, I’ve been fielding questions from Lester and half-a-dozen other stuck-up toffs in suits, and now, when I finally get a chance to come down here myself and check on progress, what do I find but you lot hanging out in front of the anomaly, large as life and twice as annoying.”  She sighed angrily.  “You’d better have a bloody good explanation for this.  And will you please stop smiling!”  This last was delivered almost in a shout.  What the hell was the matter with the man?  Claudia had been told she could be quite scary when she was in a temper, but Nick looked more liked someone who’d just discovered the meaning of life.

He slung an arm round her shoulders.  “Come on, let’s get out of here.  I promise I give you all the explanation you could ever want.  And then some.”

*   *   *   *   * 

Hours later, Stephen knocked on the door of Nick’s office, opening it when he heard Nick’s instruction to enter.  He had a faint hope that he might be more welcome this time than on the last occasion he had been here, but with things as they were one could never quite tell.

In any case, he was too desperate for information not to give it a go.  Nick had gone with Claudia back to the Home Office to debrief her and Lester about everything that had gone on over the past week or so, while Stephen had stayed behind to help Jacobs sort through their equipment, and generally get their lives back into some kind of order.

Less than half-an-hour after they’d arrived back, Connor and Abby had turned up.  Abby had looked relieved to see them, although she was still giving Stephen the cold shoulder.  Connor, of course, had started firing questions at Stephen the second he’d climbed out of the car.  It had taken all Stephen’s patience to convince him that now was not the time without just snapping at the younger man to leave him alone.

But he had gratefully accepted the offer of a lift back to London when it became apparent that Jacobs no longer needed him any more.  He’d had a few quiet words with the soldier before he had left – Jacobs looked relieved to be home, but at the same time he knew he was going to have to answer for his actions a couple of days previously.  Although how long it would be before events got sorted out to the extent that people would actually understand the effect those actions had caused was anybody’s guess.

Talking with Jacobs had also reminded Stephen of something else.  On the way home he had asked Connor about Ryan.  It still felt slightly odd to think of the man as alive when, technically, he ought to be dead.  But Connor had told him that Ryan was doing okay.  He was still pretty beat up, but nothing that time to heal couldn’t fix.  The young man had looked at Stephen strangely as he’d said this, as if Stephen ought to know it already.  But Stephen still wasn’t willing to get into everything that had happened – quite apart from anything else, he was so tired he felt like his brain had turned to mush.

Connor and Abby had dropped him off at his flat mid-afternoon, telling him to get some sleep as he looked ‘like he’d been stomped on by a Gorgonopsid’ (Connor’s words, not Abby’s).  But Stephen hadn’t been able to do more than doze.  He figured he was still on some kind of adrenaline high.  He was desperate to find out what had gone on at the Home Office, and he was half-expecting a phone call at any second, telling him to report for his own debriefing.

But even though the phone call never came, by 8 o’clock he couldn’t stand the not-knowing any longer, and so, giving up on sleep, he had headed over to the university.  Despite their current differences, Stephen still knew Nick pretty well, and he knew that there was no way he’d be anywhere other than in his office tonight, no matter how tired he was.

“Hi,” he said tentatively, as he made his way across the cluttered office towards Nick’s desk.

“Hi,” said Nick absently, his eyes glued to his computer screen.

Stephen decided it was safe enough to sit down.  “So, how did it go at the Home Office?” he asked, when Nick didn’t show any signs of volunteering the information.

Nick dragged his attention away from the computer.  “About as well as could be expected,” he responded.  “I must have gone over everything about five times, and I’m still not sure they believed me, or even understood me.  I get that – it must be weird for Claudia, having someone tell her that she didn’t exist for a while, and that we had to mess around with time paradoxes and timelines to bring her back.  As far she’s concerned, she’s been here the whole time.”

“Yeah, about that…” said Stephen.  “What exactly happened?  Never mind Claudia and the rest of the people at the Home Office, _I_ still don’t understand exactly what we’ve achieved.”

“Nor did I,” Nick admitted.  “Actually, once again it was Connor who helped me sort everything out.”

“You’ve seen Connor?”

“Yes.  He turned up here after dropping you off and started badgering me with questions.  Said you wouldn’t tell him anything.  In the end it was easier to answer him than to get him to go away.  And as it turned out, he was very helpful in figuring some stuff out.”

“And…?”

“Well, as I said, according to Claudia, she’s been here the whole time we were trying to bring her back.  It’s like she never vanished, which _is_ what we set out to accomplish.  And apparently, a couple of days ago you and I – and Jacobs and his men – disappeared.”

“We went through the anomaly,” agreed Stephen, nodding.

“From our point-of-view, yes,” replied Nick.  “But from their point-of-view, that’s not what happened.  As we predicted, now we’ve changed the timeline back so Claudia never vanished, there was no need for us to be at the anomaly site two days ago.  So instead we just disappeared.  They realised when Abby tried to get hold of me about something, and couldn’t find me anywhere.  Then she tried calling you and got nothing again.  It was then that she raised the alarm with Claudia, and they realised that Jacobs and his men were missing too.”

“And then we just randomly appear back through the anomaly,” finished Stephen.  “No wonder she was upset!”

Nick chuckled.  “That was a pretty spectacular rant,” he agreed.  “Although, do you remember when we shot down the pteranodon, and she…”  He trailed off when he noticed the expression on Stephen’s face.  “What?”

“Actually, I don’t remember,” said Stephen.  “Well, I remember the pteranodon,” he amended, “but I don’t remember Claudia being there.  You forget, I come from the timeline where Claudia didn’t exist.  And apparently I’m not suddenly going to recall her now that she’s been brought back.”

Nick looked shocked for a second.  “I hadn’t thought of that,” he admitted quietly.  He thought for a minute.  “This is going to be confusing,” he said eventually.  “Everybody remembers different things.  Claudia, Lester, Abby, Connor – they all belong to the restored timeline now, and will never really know what we went through to bring that timeline back.  You and the soldiers remember the events of the past few days, but don’t remember Claudia – you’re going to have to get to know her all over again.  I’m the only one who remembers both Claudia and what we did to get her back.”

Stephen considered pointing out that Helen probably remembered too, but he decided against introducing Nick’s wife into the conversation.  That wouldn’t be helpful in the slightest.

“One thing I still don’t understand, though,” he said thoughtfully.  “Why are we still here?  I thought we were supposed to vanish when we restored the timeline.  Or, since we didn’t, shouldn’t there be other versions of us in this timeline, since we never had to prevent Claudia vanishing in the first place?  Claudia says we just disappeared two days ago.  But doesn’t that mean we were _in_ her timeline, doing things other than jumping around the prehistoric looking for the predators?  But that can’t be right, because we _know_ we weren’t”

Nick held up a hand to stop Stephen’s flow of increasingly convoluted questions.  “That’s where Connor’s help came in handy,” he said.  “That boy seems to be a walking encyclopaedia for this kind of stuff.  He told me about a new theory that’s emerged recently in the physics community.  I didn’t even try to understand all the references and technobabble, but the gist of it seems to be that time has a kind of ‘self-consistency’ mechanism – ‘self-protection’, if you will.  In our timeline, time has progressed to this date – this is an immutable fact, and we are witnesses to it.  And because we are witnesses to it, that meant we couldn’t just vanish when we essentially changed our own past, because then there would be no witnesses to the change.”

Nick paused and frowned.  He could tell by the confused look on Stephen’s face that he wasn’t explaining it very well.  Which was unsurprising, considering he had barely understood it when Connor had explained it to _him_.  He suddenly decided to forget the technical stuff Connor had tried to drum into him, and just give Stephen the conclusion.

“Ultimately, what it means is that we just slot back into our timeline at the right date to match our ages, even if we’ve done things to change our past, or people affected by those changes remember us as doing something different to what we were actually doing.  Any alternative versions of ourselves will merge with us at the second we re-enter our timeline, leaving only one version of each person.”

Stephen looked confused for a couple more seconds, and then smiled.  “I’m still not sure I understand it all,” he said.  “But so long as it means we’re not going to suddenly vanish, I’ll accept that Connor’s technobabble might have some merit.”

“We’re not going to suddenly vanish,” confirmed Nick.  “You, me, Jacobs, Anders, and the rest – we’re all here to stay.  As we are.  With the memories we have.  No matter how those memories might differ from the ones other people might have.”

For a second Stephen couldn’t help but contemplate how it might have been better if Nick had lost some of the memories he had of events before all this had happened.  And some of what he was thinking must have shown on his face, because a guarded look suddenly came into Nick’s eyes.  The atmosphere, which had previously been almost as comfortable as it used to be, suddenly developed an edge.  An awkward silence descended, which neither of them seemed to know how to break.

It was Nick who did it in the end, taking refuge in work and professionalism.  “Well, if that’s all you wanted, I really have to get cracking on this report about everything that’s happened.  Having Claudia back means that I now have my very own Home Office representative on my back again.  I could almost wish it was just Lester again.  He goes out of his way not to bother me.  But I suppose…”

“Nick, stop.  This is ridiculous.  We can’t go on like this.”  Stephen knew he was forcing the issue, but he suddenly didn’t care.  They were going to sort things out between them, and they were going to do it now.

“Stephen, can’t we just leave it?  Please?”  Nick suddenly sounded very tired.  “We’ve managed to claw back at least some semblance of a good working relationship, but I honestly don’t know how much further we can go.  Can’t you just be happy with that?”

“No,” replied Stephen stubbornly.  “I can’t.  I know what I did was wrong, but can’t we at least try to move past it?  You said before that our relationship was at the bottom of your list of priorities – well, now everything else on that list is dealt with, can’t you devote some time to this?  Or don’t you care?  Don’t you want to try and fix it?”

“Of course I want to try and fix it,” said Nick.  “I just don’t know if we can, that’s all.  The situation is more complicated than you think.  You really don’t want to open that can of worms.”

Stephen sighed loudly.  “Don’t tell me what I do and don’t want,” he retorted, suddenly angry at Nick’s pig-headedness.  “If I didn’t want to sort this out, I could quite easily have left you to get yourself killed by that predator!”

It was a childish and facetious thing to say, and Stephen regretted the words as soon as they had left his mouth.  He had no desire to use that incident against Nick, and he wished desperately he could take back what he had said.

Nick’s eyes had narrowed dangerously.  “Oh, so that’s how it’s going to be, is it?” he said quietly.  “You think that because you saved my life, I should forgive you for betraying and hurting me that badly?  Well, I’m sorry, Stephen, but it doesn’t work like that.  You can’t just wipe away something bad by doing something good.”

“No…Nick, I…look, I’m sorry, okay?”  Stephen stumbled over the words.  “I don’t think that at all.  I shouldn’t have said it.  I just want us to be friends again,” he finished helplessly.

Now it was Nick’s turn to sigh.  “I don’t know if that’s possible,” he said.  “I don’t know if we can be friends again.  You chose _her_ , when you could have chosen…do you understand just how much you’ve hurt me, Stephen?”

Stephen frowned.  Something was slightly off here.  Something about Nick’s choice of words was telling him that he was missing something important.  But he couldn’t quite seem to pin down what that thing might be.

Nick chuckled bitterly.  “Of course you don’t understand,” he continued, answering his own question.  “You don’t understand because I’ve never given you the slightest hint.  For such a long time I barely understood it myself.  And that, like so many things, is something else I can blame Helen’s disappearance for.  I was so busy mourning her that I failed to see what was right in front of me.  It took betrayal to reveal the truth to me.”

And there it was.  Like the clicking together of jigsaw pieces, everything suddenly came together in Stephen’s mind.  Stephen hadn’t just hurt Nick by choosing Helen – he had hurt Nick by choosing Helen over _him_.

The revelation was staggering, to say the least, and Stephen had no idea how to respond to it.  But he suddenly knew why Nick thought they couldn’t be friends any more.  Nick wanted more than that now – he wouldn’t just settle for friendship.  But Stephen’s actions had shattered Nick’s trust so completely that Nick couldn’t allow himself to forgive and fight for a relationship in case he got hurt again.  It was a hopeless situation.

Nick’s eyes followed the play of emotions across Stephen’s face.  “ _Now_ you understand,” he said sadly.

Stephen looked at him.  “I don’t know what to say to you,” he replied softly.  “I’m sorry.  I can’t give you much more than that.  But until that’s enough for you, neither of us will be able to move forward.  And even then, I don’t know if things would work between us.  I’m not even sure if I want the same thing you want.”  He smiled wryly.  “It seems we both have some thinking to do.”

“I know,” conceded Nick wearily.  “Maybe you should leave.”  His tone made the words a suggestion, not an order, but Stephen agreed wholeheartedly with the idea, and rose from his chair.

“One more thing,” he said quietly, not sure how Nick would take what he was about to say.  “You need to talk to Claudia.  I may not know the woman, but anyone could see how she reacted when you hugged her earlier.  You need to let her down gently before she builds her hopes up too high.”  Part of him was amazed that he could be thinking about a woman who was essentially a stranger to him at a time like this, but another part saw the sense of his words.  There were more elements to this problem than just his and Nick’s feelings, and they all needed resolving.

*   *   *   *   * 

Late next morning, Stephen awoke with no more idea about what he was going to do than he’d had when he’d finally got to sleep the previous night.

It had been close to midnight by the time he’d returned to his flat after talking to Nick, and he’d felt absolutely shattered.  But once again he’d found sleep hard to come by.  He knew that there was no way he could come to any sort of resolution about him and Nick while he was so tired, and yet his brain simply refused to shut down – his thoughts just circling round and round in his head.

He had finally dropped off around 4am, the demands of his body overcoming the demands of his mind, and even though it was now – Stephen squinted blearily at his alarm clock – 11:17, he still didn’t feel like he’d had enough sleep to be able to face his problems again.

But after trying to doze off again, he eventually concluded that sleep wasn’t going to reclaim him, and so he dragged himself into the kitchen to make a cup of industrial-strength coffee.

A second cup of coffee and a hot shower later, he felt just about human enough to face the world.  Unfortunately, that also meant that he couldn’t ignore the persistent voices in his head that were reminding him he had some issues to deal with.

Pouring a third cup of coffee, Stephen sprawled on his sofa and tried to think things through logically.

Nick wanted more from him than friendship – had done for while now – but Stephen’s betrayal had made him wonder whether he could trust Stephen with his heart.  He was wondering if maybe it would be better if they just severed all ties between them.  One thing was for certain, though – he felt he couldn’t be ‘just friends’, knowing he wanted more.  So basically, it was all or nothing for Nick.

Okay.  But what did Stephen himself want?  And that was where logic failed him.  He didn’t know.  He had long suspected that Nick was an extremely important part of his life – a suspicion that had become concrete fact when suddenly Nick _wasn’t_ really in his life any more.  At least, not in the ways that mattered.

But did that mean he wanted more than friendship too?  Was he able to take that step, knowing that if he didn’t, that was essentially it between them?  It seemed unlikely that, if Nick wouldn’t settle for friendship, he would allow them to carry on working together, even for the sake of the anomaly project.  After all, it wasn’t as if he couldn’t find another lab technician easily enough – there were plenty of young up-and-coming palaeontologists who would jump at the chance to work with Professor Nick Cutter.

It was no good.  Logic wasn’t going to work here.  This wasn’t something he could figure out in a few hours.  He couldn’t make this decision with his head – he had to work out what his heart was feeling.  And right now it was feeling very confused.

He needed something to distract him.  He needed someone to take his mind off things.  Normally, top of that list would have been Nick.  The irony of that was not lost on Stephen.  Abby was still not particularly happy with him either, and Connor was, as usual, following her lead.

So instead, he went to see Ryan.

*   *   *   *   * 

Stephen wandered down the hospital corridor, looking for Room 302.  He was impressed by the facilities Home Office budgets would stretch to.  No jam-packed NHS wards here – every patient had their own room, and the ratio of nurses to patients was much higher than any hospital Stephen had ever been in.  He wondered for a second why he hadn’t received this kind of treatment after being bitten by the centipede, but then dismissed it as Lester’s unwillingness to expend more time and effort than was absolutely necessary on the civilian scientists he found so annoying.  Stephen suspected that a significant amount of money went into training Special Forces recruits, and therefore the men were worth taking extra-special care of when they got hurt.

Stephen felt like he had got to know Ryan pretty well over the past few months – more so than Nick, or Connor, or any of the others had, at any rate.  He figured it probably had something to do with his being not totally useless with a gun, and knowing how to handle himself in dangerous situations.  He felt like he had earned Ryan’s respect fairly early on, and from that the two men had built, if not exactly a friendship, then at least something more than an acquaintance.

He had been upset when Nick had returned from the Permian and announced Ryan had died, but in the whirlwind of events that had followed, it was almost as if the soldier’s death had been forgotten, a fact that Stephen felt slightly guilty about.  Which was part of the reason he had come to see Ryan now.  The man was alive again, and Stephen felt like he deserved some kind of acknowledgement for what he had been through.

Finding Room 302 at last, Stephen knocked gently and then stuck his head round the door.  Ryan was sitting up in bed, looking bored as only a soldier confined to a hospital can.  But his expression brightened when he spotted Stephen.

“Hart!  Come on in.  God knows I could do with the company.”

Stephen grinned and stepped into the room.  “Good to see you’re doing okay,” he said.  “And call me Stephen.”

“Take a seat, Stephen,” said Ryan, gesturing at one of the spectacularly uncomfortable looking plastic chairs that seemed to be a feature of every hospital, no matter how swanky it was.  “I would tell you to call me Tom, but I don’t think anyone’s actually done that for about five years, so we’ll just stick with Ryan, I think.”

Stephen sat, eyeing the acres of bandaging that were covering Ryan’s body.  His torso was almost completely swathed in white, and Stephen could see the lumps under the blankets that indicated his left leg was just as heavily wrapped.

Ryan noticed where he was looking and shrugged.  “It’s worse than it looks,” he said.  “One deep slash right across my chest, ditto down my leg, and some pretty spectacular bruising.  But I’m told I’m healing nicely.  The nurses have said they’ll take the bandages off tomorrow, and they might even let me go home the day after that – so long as I promise to take all my medicine, and not move from my sofa for another week.”

His voice betrayed a certain amount of impatience at the mollycoddling, but Stephen was just relieved that the guy wasn’t in pieces all over the Permian.

“It seems pretty quiet around here,” he observed, changing the subject.  “Have you had many other visitors?”

“Some of the guys were here earlier in the week,” Ryan replied.  “But the nurses complained they made too much noise, so the Sister forbade more than two of them to visit at a time.  So I’ve had a couple of them in here every day.”  He paused.  “Ms. Brown’s been to see me a couple of times as well.  You just missed her, actually.  She had an interesting tale to tell.  Although she didn’t seem to quite believe it herself.”

Stephen looked at him, wondering exactly how much of the tale as Claudia understood it she had told him.  But Ryan was a trained soldier, not likely to give anything away just because a scientist stared at him.

“It was an interesting few days,” Stephen said finally.  Ryan’s raised eyebrow told him exactly what he thought of _that_ understatement.

“She told me I’m supposed to be dead,” the soldier said lightly, although trained as he was he still couldn’t quite hide the emotion that the statement provoked.

“Well, I don’t know about _supposed to be_ ,” said Stephen slowly.  “After all, if you were supposed to be dead, you being here now would have done horrible things to the timeline.  But you _were_ dead.  Nick buried you in the Permian.  You saw your own skeleton the first time you went there.”

“I remember that,” replied Ryan.  Then he frowned.  “But if I’m here now, how can I remember that?  My skeleton isn’t in the Permian for me to have seen.”

Stephen chuckled.  “I wouldn’t think about it too deeply,” he said.  “You could ask Connor to explain it for you, if you like, but you really wouldn’t want to hurt your brain now that the rest of your body is finally healing.  Just accept that the skeleton was there then, and that you’re here now.  For all we know the bones could now belong to one of the other soldiers that died during the predator attack.”

A shadow passed across Ryan’s face at Stephen’s words.  “I lost a lot of good men that day,” he said softly.  “And all because of Helen Cutter’s complete and utter selfishness.  Has that woman ever thought about anyone other than herself?”

“I highly doubt it,” replied Stephen bitterly.  Seeing Ryan had managed to distract him from his problems for a while, but now they all came flooding back.

Ryan noticed.  “So, how are things between you and the Professor?” he asked sympathetically.  “Even considering what I’ve just said about his lovely wife, I still have trouble believing that anyone could be quite _that_ callous.  Granted, you made a mistake, but that was not the way for it to come out.”

“I did make a mistake,” Stephen admitted.  “A huge one.  And Nick wants to forgive me…I think.”  He sighed.  “Things are…weird between us.”  He suddenly realised he didn’t want to talk about it.  The whole thing was suddenly too huge to put into words.  And he couldn’t face rehashing it all with Ryan.

Ryan must have seen something in his face, because he smiled briefly and changed the subject again.

“So, hopefully the nurses will make good on their promises and let me out of here the day after tomorrow.  But the rest of the lads are on manoeuvres that day.  Do you fancy coming and helping an injured man back to his flat?”


	8. Chapter 8

 

“I’m sorry.”

Claudia looked at Nick quizzically across the table.  She’d turned up at his office early to check on the progress of his report, but as soon as she’d appeared he’d immediately switched off his computer and dragged her out to one of the campus cafes for a coffee.  Despite the relatively early hour the place was still busy, full of students getting their first caffeine hit of the day before going to morning lectures.  Claudia had snagged a table in the corner while Nick had bought a couple of coffees.  He’d started apologising almost as soon as he’d sat down.

“Sorry for what?” Claudia asked.  “I don’t really see that you’ve got anything to be sorry for.  You’ve apparently brought me back from time paradox oblivion, for heaven’s sake!”

Nick sighed.  He looked upset, and slightly scared, weirdly enough.  “This hasn’t got anything to do with that,” he admitted.

“So what are you apologising for?”

He took a deep breath.  “For leading you on,” he said softly.

“Leading me on?  What do you…oh.”  Suddenly realising what he meant, Claudia was abruptly lost for words.

“I know – it makes me a total arsehole,” continued Nick.  “I didn’t mean to hurt you.  But I didn’t really know what I wanted.  But I shouldn’t have used you to try and find out.”

He looked so upset that Claudia almost felt sorry for him.  Almost.

“Is this about Helen?” she asked, dreading the answer.

“No,” replied Nick.  “At least, not entirely.  In a way, it would be easier if it were.  That would at least make it a straightforward problem.”

“Then it must be about Stephen,” Claudia asserted.

Her astuteness looked to have blindsided Nick.  Even if he had been tempted to deny it, the look on his face was telling her everything she needed to know.  She decided to take pity on him.

“Your apology wasn’t quite as unexpected as I might have made out,” she admitted.  “Okay, so I hoped that your feelings for me were genuine, but I already had an inkling that might not be the case.”

“But…”

“Only an idiot could miss how devastated you were by Helen’s little revelation,” said Claudia.

Nick was struck by how similar her words were to Stephen’s about _her_ the previous day.  Apparently neither of them were terribly good at hiding their emotions.  He resisted the urge to smile.

Claudia was still talking.  “…and I suspected that you were more hurt by Stephen’s betrayal than Helen’s.  After all, you’ve had a lot more time to get used to Helen’s less-than-loving behaviour.”

“You’re right,” agreed Nick.  “And I want to forgive him.  You have no idea how much.  But he betrayed me in the worst way possible, and then lied about it for eight years.  Eight years!  That’s almost as long as we’ve been friends.  It’s hard to accept that the most valued friendship you’ve ever had concealed such an ugly secret.”

“You should tell Stephen all this,” said Claudia gently.

“Oh, I have,” Nick assured her.  “But we’ve reached a bit of an impasse.  There are things we need to sort out, but neither of us is quite sure how to move forward.”

“Well, you’ve just said you want to forgive him,” said Claudia.  “So why don’t you?”

The way she said it made it sound so simple, and Nick suddenly found himself wondering if it could really be that easy.  Just forgive Stephen.  Move on.  But…

“There’s more to it than that,” he said tiredly.  “I could forgive him.  But that wouldn’t automatically just put things back to the way they were.”

“Because you have feelings for him.”

“I…what?” said Nick, startled.  Had he really been that obvious?

“You have feelings for Stephen,” repeated Claudia, speaking as if to a very small child.  “That’s why it’s so hard for you to forgive him, isn’t it?”

“Yes, that’s exactly it,” conceded Nick.  He smiled wryly.  “You are an amazing woman, Claudia Brown.  And if there were any sense in the world I would have fallen in love with _you_.”

“But you didn’t,” replied Claudia, unable to quite conceal her regret, but making sure she didn’t let any blame colour her voice.  “It wasn’t to be.”

“Apparently not,” Nick agreed.

“And what about Stephen?  Does he have feelings for you?”

“I don’t know,” said Nick.  “I don’t think even _he_ knows.  We’re both thinking things through, but who knows how long it’ll be before we actually come to any sort of decision.  About anything.”

He looked so woebegone that Claudia just had to try and comfort him.  “Have faith, Nick,” she said softly.  “Things will sort themselves out eventually.  You’ll see.”

*   *   *   *   * 

Stephen dumped Ryan’s bag on the floor, and then watched as Ryan awkwardly lowered himself on to the sofa, propping his crutches up next to him.  He had claimed he didn’t need them, but it hadn’t been hard to miss the grimace of pain that crossed his face the first time he put any weight on his injured leg, and Stephen had joined forces with the nurses in bullying him into accepting the crutches.  It hadn’t hurt to point out that, if he didn’t take them, the nurses would probably make him stay in the hospital at least another day – in this instance, Stephen wasn’t above a bit of blackmail to get the desired result.

That hadn’t stopped Ryan grumbling about the crutches all the way out to Stephen’s car, and all the way back to his flat, however.  Finally, after pulling up in front of Ryan’s building, Stephen had flatly challenged Ryan to get himself and his baggage up to his flat on the third floor without the assistance of either Stephen _or_ the crutches.  There were a few seconds of silence, during which Stephen had suddenly worried that Ryan was going to stubbornly take him up on the challenge.  But then he had conceded, albeit with ill grace, that he wouldn’t be able to.

The upshot of which was that Ryan had used the crutches to get himself into the building, while Stephen had carried his bag.  Although he had been glad to discover that Ryan’s building had a lift – Stephen wasn’t sure that Ryan would have made it up several flights of stairs, even with the assistance of _both_ Stephen and the crutches.

“So, do you want a cup of tea or anything?” Stephen asked, once Ryan was properly settled.

Ryan smiled wryly.  “This is my place.  Shouldn’t I be the one offering refreshments?”

Stephen raised an eyebrow.  “Well, if you think you can juggle a kettle, mugs, and teabags, be my guest.”

“Okay, I’ll let you do it,” Ryan responded.  “I’ll just relax here.  You know, a man could get used to being waited on.”

“Well, try not to,” Stephen joked, as he crossed to the kitchen area of Ryan’s open-plan flat.  “You’re not going to be out of action _that_ long.”

Opening a cupboard at random, he discovered a half-used box of teabags.  He also discovered that Ryan’s kitchen was surprisingly well stocked for a Special Forces soldier who was out on missions more often than not.

Ryan caught Stephen’s look of surprise.  “Jacobs and Anders felt guilty about not being around today,” he explained.  “So I took advantage and made them go shopping for me yesterday.”

“You know, I can’t really picture any of your lot in a supermarket,” mused Stephen as he filled the kettle.

“They weren’t happy about the prospect,” confirmed Ryan.  “I think Jacobs would rather take on a whole pack of Gorgonopsids than a supermarket full of trolleys and screaming kids.”

Something niggled at Stephen’s brain.  “Hang on a minute.  You said the guys were on manoeuvres today, right?”

“That’s right.”

“But surely Jacobs isn’t.  I mean, after what happened in the Permian…”  He trailed off, suddenly wondering if Ryan even knew that he was only alive because of Jacobs.  Had he put his foot in it?  But Ryan’s next words set his mind at ease.

“He’s at a disciplinary hearing.  Hopefully he’ll get off with nothing more than a black mark.  Granted, he _was_ the senior military officer in your team, and therefore Cutter’s instructions weren’t actually an _order_.  But technically he should have accepted that Cutter knew more about the situation than he did.”  Ryan paused.  “Although I can’t exactly say that I’m unhappy about what he did.  After all, I wouldn’t be here talking to you if he hadn’t done it.”

Stephen nodded.  “I’m sure he’ll be fine,” he said, even as he was aware that the words sounded like nothing more than an empty platitude.

“I hope so.”

There was a short silence, in which Stephen finished making the tea and brought it to Ryan, afterwards settling himself at the opposite end of the sofa with his own mug.

“So, how long are you going to need those things for?” he asked, nodding towards the crutches.

Ryan grimaced.  “At least a couple of weeks, apparently,” he replied.  “The nurses say I’m healing well – very well, actually – but I need to keep the weight off the leg so I don’t pull the stitches out, or cause it to heal wonky.  Basically, I need to remain as immobile as possible for the next fourteen days.  The crutches are really only for going to the bathroom, and things like that.”

“Are you going to be alright here on your own?” asked Stephen worriedly, although at the same time he wondered if ‘Ryan the capable soldier’ would be insulted by the question.

“Well, Jacobs is going to be free for a while after today, while the brass deliberate over his punishment, so he’s offered to come and help me out,” said Ryan.  “And I think the rest of the guys are drawing up some kind of ridiculous rota so that they can all lend a hand.”  He scowled.  “Honestly, anyone would think I’d never been injured before.  I am in Special Forces – I _can_ take care of myself.”

Stephen fought off the urge to laugh.  Ryan was funny when he was sulking, but he didn’t fancy pissing off the soldier any more than he already was.  Even with two serious injuries, Ryan could probably still kill him _and_ make it look like an accident.

Suddenly he realised something – this was the first time he’d felt like laughing in over a week.  And ironically, that was a sobering thought.  Stephen’s cheerfulness suddenly fled, and all of his problems and issues came crowding back.

“Want to talk about it yet?”  Ryan was watching him narrowly, and Stephen knew it would be no use pretending that he didn’t know what the soldier was referring to.

However, much to his surprise, he discovered that now, perhaps, he _did_ want to talk about it.  Heaven knew the last couple of days of endless consideration and solitary soul-searching had got him precisely nowhere.

“Nick has feelings for me,” he said bluntly.  “More than friendly ones.  And I don’t know what to do about it.”

“Do you have the same kind of feelings for him?” Ryan asked cautiously.

“That’s just it – I have no idea!”  Suddenly unable to sit still, Stephen rose from the sofa and started pacing around the room.  “He says that if we can’t have this thing that’s more than friendship, then we can’t have anything at all.  We have to sever all contact.  And that’s even supposing he can get past what I did and forgive me.”

“Sounds like an ultimatum to me,” commented Ryan neutrally.

Stephen sighed.  “It is, I suppose,” he acknowledged.  “But I understand why he’s made it.  I know what it’s like to be around someone you’re in love with, and yet have to preserve a façade of simple friendship.”

“Helen.”

“Helen,” Stephen confirmed.  “I mooned after her for the longest time before she decided she wanted me, but I had to hide it from both her and Nick.  Okay, so my feelings were a lot less honourable than Nick’s are now, and as it turned out I wasn’t really in love with Helen.  Nonetheless, it’s hard just to be someone’s friend when you know you feel more.  I can see why he doesn’t think we could ever just be friends again.”

“So the question remains – what about _your_ feelings?”

“I don’t _know_ ,” said Stephen again.  “Sometimes I think I’m close to making a decision, like I would only have to take that final step, and everything would just fall into place.  But I can’t seem to move past my doubts.”  He smiled ruefully, and sat back down on the sofa, much closer to Ryan this time.  Letting his head sag back, he flung an arm over his face.  “Everything’s such a mess,” he muttered.

Ryan chuckled.  “You want my opinion?” he asked.

“Please,” replied Stephen.  “I’ll take any help I can get at this point.”

“You’re thinking about it too much.  You can’t treat this as a _decision_.  You have to go with your gut-feeling.  What is your heart telling you?”

He placed a hand on Stephen’s thigh, intending the gesture to be one of friendly comfort.  But Stephen’s reaction surprised him – and that was saying something for someone who had been trained for the Special Forces.  Suddenly he found himself pushed back into the cushions, with Stephen’s face hovering inches from his own.

“What are you doing?”

“Going with my gut-feeling,” replied Stephen, before kissing him.

It was immediately apparent that Stephen had never kissed a man before, although Ryan couldn’t fault his enthusiasm.  Men were always surprised how different it felt to kiss another man as opposed to kissing a woman.  After all, in this respect there was no essential difference between the sexes.  Lips, noses – everything was in the same place.  The actions were the same.  The intent was the same.

And yet, it was always different.  And that was always a surprise.

To his credit, Stephen appeared to be a very fast learner, and adapted very quickly to the almost unnameable differences.  So quickly, in fact, that Ryan almost let himself be drawn into the kiss, almost started kissing back.  Almost.

Summoning what strength he had, he pushed Stephen away – not hard enough to be rough, but firmly enough that Stephen suddenly found himself sitting back beside Ryan instead of on top of him.

“What…”

“That wasn’t a good idea.”  Ryan cut through Stephen’s question before he could ask it.  “You’re upset and confused, and you’re not thinking straight.  And, quite frankly, I refuse to be the person you take advantage of while you’re in this state.”

“That isn’t…I wasn’t…”  The words trailed away as Stephen dropped his head into his hands.  “You’re right,” he muttered after a few moments.  “I’m sorry.  I don’t know what I was thinking.”

“That’s precisely it,” responded Ryan gently.  “You _don’t_ know what you’re thinking.  Or feeling.  It’s okay, I don’t blame you.  But I don’t think this is the answer.”

“I wish it were simple.  I need _something_ to be simple.  Everything’s got so complicated, I feel like my head’s going to explode.  I wish I could forget it all, just for a moment.  Can you understand that?”

Stephen looked at him, and Ryan could see the naked need shining in his eyes.

“Yes, I can understand,” he said.  “Special Forces, remember?  I’ve made a hundred hard decisions in my career, and seen and done things I wish every day I could forget.  And maybe it is possible to forget them just for a moment.  But sooner or later you have to face them.  You have to make those decisions, accept the consequences, and try to move on.”

Stephen nodded, but Ryan could still see the desperation in his glance.  And he felt something give way.

“But, like I said, it _is_ possible to forget for just a moment.  Maybe that’s what helps us to make the decisions.  To move on.”

Extending a hand, he pulled Stephen back towards him until the other man was leaning over him once more.  “You do realise you’re going to be doing all the work here, right?” he whispered.  “I’m not supposed to be moving around too much, remember?”

For an answer Stephen kissed him again.  He’d definitely learned from his previous experience, and Ryan was content to let the kiss go on for some time as the two men explored each other’s mouths.

Eventually, however, it became rather difficult to ignore the tightness of his jeans, and his hand drifted down to massage his hard cock through the fabric.  Stephen noticed immediately and allowed his gaze to flick downwards.  He shifted his body slightly, and Ryan could feel Stephen’s own bulge against his thigh.  The friction made Stephen’s eyes widen slightly, as if he were surprised about something.

Ryan continued stroking himself, letting his lust show in his eyes.  Stephen’s own gaze showed a mixture of desire and uncertainty, but also determination.  Catching hold of Ryan’s hand, he removed it from his lap and went to work on the button and zipper of Ryan’s jeans.

As soon as they were undone, Stephen planted another quick kiss on Ryan’s lips and then slithered down until he was kneeling on the floor between Ryan’s thighs.  Reaching out, he caressed Ryan through his boxers, making the soldier moan slightly and tilt his head back.

But Stephen wanted more than that.  His intention must have shown on his face, because Ryan asked breathlessly, “Are you sure?”

“Absolutely,” replied Stephen.  Then he grinned.  “Just don’t expect miracles, that’s all.”  He gestured at Ryan to raise his hips slightly, which Ryan managed to do despite his bandaged leg and torso, although he couldn’t help the slight spasm of pain that crossed his face as he did so.  Stephen swiftly tugged down his jeans and boxers until they were resting on his thighs, exposing his cock.

For just a second Stephen looked like he perhaps wasn’t _absolutely_ sure, then the look of lustful determination returned, and he leaned forward.

As Stephen’s mouth closed over his cock Ryan couldn’t help himself – he moaned loudly.  He hadn’t realised how much the pain of his injuries had been affecting him – but here, finally, was something to distract him from that.  Stephen was a novice at this, but damn, it felt good.  And, as with the kissing, the man was a quick study.  He had already found the sensitive spot on the underside of Ryan’s cock that made the soldier moan long and low, and determined that swirling his tongue around the head made Ryan gasp and shudder slightly.  Ryan let his head tip back again, and gave himself over to the sensations.

All too soon, however, he could feel himself approaching the edge, and he reached down to grasp Stephen’s shoulder, letting the other man know and giving him an out if he wanted it.

But Stephen showed no signs of faltering, and the hand on his shoulder tightened abruptly as Ryan came, moaning Stephen’s name and noting even through the haze fogging his brain that Stephen’s mouth didn’t let up for a moment, not until Ryan was completely spent and his shudders were dying down a little.

When he’d finally gathered enough of the floating scraps of his brain back together to resume coherent thought, Ryan noticed that Stephen had sat back on his heels, and was watching him with a somewhat thoughtful expression.  Thoughtful, but not freaked out.

Ryan beckoned with a finger.  “I can’t do anything while you’re down there.  You may not get anything as good as that, but I’ve been told I’m no slouch with my hands.”

“No.”

“No?”

“No.  I mean, I can’t…”

And then Ryan saw it.  Something in Stephen’s eyes.  Resolution.

“You mean, you can’t with _me_.”

“Yes.  I mean…shit.  I’m sorry.  I feel like a total arsehole.  Like I’ve led you on or something.”

“Let’s not make this into anything more than it was,” said Ryan firmly.  “Just two guys helping each other out, that’s all.  No strings attached.  I’m no wilting flower, Stephen.  I’ll survive.”  He grinned to show there were no hard feelings, but Stephen still looked slightly unconvinced.

“You don’t want me, Stephen.  You want Cutter.  Isn’t that right?  Maybe I could wish you hadn’t had your epiphany while you were sucking my cock, but life doesn’t always turn out like you plan.”

“Sorry.”

“Stop saying that and go and find the Professor.  We both know that’s what you really want.”

“But what about you?  Will you be able to manage?”

Ryan sighed in annoyance.  “I’ll be fine.  I’m a tough-nut soldier, remember?  And if I’m not…well, the lads will be finished with their exercises in an hour or two – I’ll give one of them a call if I need anything.”

“Well, if you’re sure…”

“Just go!”

*   *   *   *   * 

Connor and Abby looked up as Stephen burst into the office, looking out of breath and slightly excited about something.

“Is Nick here?”

“No, he left a while ago,” said Abby.  “He said he was having trouble concentrating, so he took off.”

“He _did_ look a bit distracted,” confirmed Connor.  “Is there something the matter?  Can we help?”

“No, there’s nothing you can do,” said Stephen.  “We’ll sort it out.”

Abby smiled tentatively.  “No offence, Stephen,” she said, “but are you sure _you’re_ the best person to help him out?  You’re not really his favourite person at the moment, you know.”

Stephen looked like he was resisting the urge to laugh.  “Trust me, in this instance I’m absolutely the best person to help him.  How long ago did you say he left?”

“Couple of hours,” estimated Connor.  “I think he might have muttered something about heading home if you want to go look there.”

“Thanks,” replied Stephen.  “Well, I’ll leave you two to whatever it is…what _are_ you still doing here?”

“Researching an essay,” said Connor, waving a book.  “The Professor’s insisting I complete my assignments, despite everything that’s going on.  Wish I could use the excuse of not being able to concentrate as a reason not to do any work,” he muttered darkly.

“And Abby?  You are..?”

“Keeping him company, for my sins,” she said.  “I promised to give him a lift home.”

“Right…”

“Don’t you need to go and find Cutter?” prodded Abby, as Stephen hesitated.

“Right.  Yes.  Thanks.  See you later!”  And he was gone.

Connor and Abby glanced at each other, confused.

“Something weird is going on there,” Connor asserted.

Abby nodded slowly.  “I wonder what?  Stephen looked quite wound up.  I hope they sort it out, whatever it is.”

*   *   *   *   * 

An insistent ringing of the doorbell roused Nick from his preoccupied state.  He had been trying to watch the news, but within a minute had lost track of what the reporter was saying, allowing his mind to sink back into its distracted musings.

Was it really as simple as Claudia made out?  Just forgive Stephen.  Let it all go – leave the past in the past.  And had she been right when she’d told him to have faith?  She’d worked out that he had feelings for Stephen easily enough – had she also spotted something in Stephen’s actions that had caused her to think that he reciprocated those feelings?  Nick found himself desperately hoping that she had.  Which he supposed he should take as a sign that he really _did_ want to forgive Stephen, after all.

He wasn’t sure how long he had been sitting there, trying to puzzle it all out, but the presence of someone at the door meant that he would have to put his thoughts on hold for a little while.

But when Nick opened the door, he found Stephen on his porch.  Who was, rather inexplicably, grinning like a Cheshire cat.

“Forgive me.”

“What?”

“Forgive me.  We both know you want to, so you should just do it.”

“Why?”

“Because until you do, I can’t shove you up against that wall and kiss you senseless.”

“Excuse me?”

“You heard me.”

Stephen’s grin widened further, and Nick was torn between grinning at him in return, and punching his lights out for being so insufferably smug and sure of himself.  After all, what right did Stephen have to _demand_ forgiveness?  He should have been _asking_ , or possibly even begging, shouldn’t he?

Then, as his brain finally registered what _exactly_ it was Stephen had just said, he suddenly realised that it didn’t matter any more.  It really _was_ as simple as Claudia had made out.  And also, he discovered that he quite fancied being shoved up against the wall and kissed senseless.

“I forgive you.”

In the end, the words came easily.  Nick felt like a huge weight had been lifted off his chest.  Of course, about two seconds later, he had an entirely different kind of weight pressing on him, as Stephen had made good on his promise, and was currently kissing him a way designed to fry all his brain cells at once.

“Stephen…Stephen…”

Stephen muttered something that sounded suspiciously like “now what?”, and backed-up by about half a step.

Nick found that he was laughing.  “It’s not that I don’t appreciate the gesture and everything, but do you think we could at least shut the front door first?  I don’t particularly want to give my neighbours a show.”

Stephen didn’t respond, but simply stuck one leg out and kicked the door shut.  “Happier now?”

“Much,” Nick assured him, before grabbing the lapels of his jacket and hauling him in for another kiss.

Stephen was taken slightly by surprise, but quickly regained his equilibrium, and was soon kissing Nick back with a fervour that would have been scary if it wasn’t such a turn on.  However, much as Nick was enjoying being sandwiched between Stephen and the wall, he couldn’t help feeling that, after waiting for so long, he deserved a little something more.

Forcing his hand down between their bodies, he found the expected bulge in Stephen’s jeans and squeezed gently.  Stephen jumped slightly, breaking the kiss again, and looked at Nick with a mixture of surprise and lust in his eyes.

Nick smirked.  “Got the message, then?” he asked laughingly, punctuating the question with another squeeze.

Stephen’s eyes dropped closed, and a faint moan escaped him.  “Hell, yes,” he gasped.

“Good,” replied Nick.  He pushed Stephen backwards, towards the stairs.  “Up,” he commanded.

“Yes, I am,” Stephen responded cheekily.

Nick rolled his eyes and gave Stephen another small shove.  “Now,” he ordered.

It wasn’t until they were upstairs and half-undressed that Nick thought to ask the obvious question.  Catching hold of Stephen’s wrists, he stilled Stephen’s hands in the act of undoing his jeans button.  “What finally made you decide?”

Stephen hesitated.  “Promise you won’t be angry?” he said eventually.

“Why would I be angry?”

“Well…Ryan helped me out.  He showed me that it really _was_ you that I wanted to be with.”

“Showed you?  Showed y…oh.”  Understanding dawned on Nick’s face.

“Are you angry?  Should I just leave?”

Nick’s grip on Stephen’s wrists tightened.  “I don’t think so,” he said slowly.  “It’s possibly not the way I would have preferred you to make your choice, but it’s not like I really had any claim on you.  You were free to do whatever you wanted.”

“Funny, that’s kind of what Ryan said,” replied Stephen.  “I wish it hadn’t happened,” he continued honestly.  “I wish I could have just seen what was right in front of me without having to be pushed like that.  I’m sorry.”

“I think it’s about time you stopped saying that to me,” said Nick seriously.  Then he smiled.  “In fact, I think it’s about time you stopped saying anything at all.”

He kissed Stephen heatedly and then turned his attention back to Stephen’s clothes, as Stephen’s hands resumed their fumbling at his own jeans.

Finally they were both naked and staring hungrily at each other.  Although Nick thought he could detect a faint hint of nervousness colouring Stephen’s lust.

“Are you okay?”

Stephen laughed, a little shakily, Nick thought.  “You do realise you’re going to have to teach me, right?  That I’ve never done this before?”

For a second Nick was surprised, and then he realised that of course that was the case.  He’d know Stephen for nearly ten years, after all – he knew Stephen hadn’t been with a man before.  And yet, somehow, this issue had escaped his attention throughout all their problems and wrangling.  He had simply never considered it as a factor before.

“Are you sure you’re okay with this?” he asked softly.  “I don’t want to force you into anything you don’t want.”

A look of exasperation crossed Stephen’s face.  “For heaven’s sake, Nick!” he exclaimed.  “Do you think I’d really be here if I didn’t want this?  I just don’t know what to do, that’s all.”

Nick could see the embarrassment this admission caused Stephen, but he couldn’t prevent the surge of relief he felt at the other man’s declaration.  He kissed Stephen again, putting everything he had into it, trying to distract Stephen from any nerves or apprehensions.

Gently, he manoeuvred them both towards the bed, until the back of Stephen’s knees hit the edge of it, and they both crumpled softly on to the mattress.

“Let me show you,” Nick whispered.

He proceeded to kiss his way down Stephen’s body, lavishing attention on all the sensitive spots, taking his time, until Stephen was writhing and moaning beneath his ministrations.

“Just relax,” he murmured, warning Stephen as he gently probed Stephen’s entrance with a finger.

Despite himself, Stephen tensed, and Nick halted, waiting until he became used to the unfamiliar intrusion.  Gradually, by degrees, Stephen relaxed again, and Nick decided it was safe to continue.  He was as gentle as possible, and if the noises dropping from Stephen’s lips were any indication, it would appear that Stephen was starting to enjoy the sensation.

Eventually, Nick deemed it safe to add another finger.  “Relax,” he said again.

Seconds later Stephen gasped loudly as Nick’s fingers ghosted over the sensitive spot deep inside him.  “Oh god, Nick!”

Nick grinned and looked up to find Stephen watching him back, eyes lidded, lips parted slightly – a look that definitely suited him.

“What was _that_?”

“Just a little taster,” replied Nick, allowing his smile to turn wicked.  The look Stephen was giving him was doing nothing to help his willpower.  He had wanted to make sure Stephen was ready – he didn’t want to scare him off, or hurt him in any way.  But it seemed Stephen was more than ready right now, and Nick was struggling to hang on to his own equilibrium.  He had waited for this for so long that his body apparently couldn’t wait any longer.

Positioning himself, he looked into Stephen’s eyes.  “Are you sure?” he asked again, needing reassurance before they both stepped over the final line.

“Nick, if you don’t fuck me in the next two seconds, I won’t be held responsible for my actions!”

Nick took that as a sign of encouragement and, as slowly as he could, buried himself inside Stephen’s body.

“Oh god…”  It was hard to say which of them had uttered the words.  Perhaps they both had.

Slowly, achingly, Nick began thrusting, torn between spinning this out as long as possible, and just letting himself go.

“God…Nick…more…please…”

For a second Stephen’s pleas hung in Nick’s mind as willpower battled with blind lust.  Then willpower suffered a spectacular defeat, and Nick was thrusting into Stephen as hard as he could, moaning as Stephen gasped in pleasure, his hand wrapping itself around his cock and stroking in time to Nick’s thrusts.  And then, all too soon, they were coming together, shuddering out their release, and Nick could hear Stephen gasping out his name…

In the quiet aftermath, Nick raised his head from where it had been pillowed on Stephen’s chest and looked at Stephen’s face, smiling at the still slightly slack-jawed expression he was wearing.

“Quite a fortnight, hmmm?” he said.

Stephen laughed breathlessly.  “You could say that,” he agreed.  He looked at Nick tenderly.  “Any regrets?”

“Oh, plenty,” Nick replied.  “Top of the list being that we didn’t do this sooner.”

“I’m s…”

Nick stopped him by putting a finger to his lips.  “I thought I told you to stop saying that?”

“Sorry,” replied Stephen, and then, realising what he had said, laughed again.  “Seems to be a habit it might take a while to break.”

Nick rolled his eyes and then kissed him.  “Guess I’ll just have to give you something else to think about, then.”

*   *   *   *   * 

A week later, Abby watched as Cutter and Stephen loaded their gear into the truck.  Both men were smiling and joking with each other in a manner reminiscent of their old friendly relationship.  And yet, to Abby’s eyes, something still appeared to be different.  There was something new in their responses to each other.  She just couldn’t quite put her finger on what it was.

Connor came up beside her and dumped his rucksack on the ground.  “No rest for the wicked, apparently,” he observed.  “Another day, another anomaly.”  He followed Abby’s gaze towards Cutter and Stephen.  “Well, they seem to have sorted out their problems,” he commented.

“Yes,” Abby replied slowly.  She glanced at him.  “Do they seem…happier…to you?”

“Happier than over the past few weeks?  Definitely.”

“No, I mean happier in general.  Happier than they were even before all the weird stuff happened.”

Connor watched the two men for a few seconds.  “Hard to say,” he pronounced finally, and unhelpfully.

Abby sighed.  “You’re probably right,” she said.  “But I still think something’s going on…”


End file.
